“There’s another dimension besides your world, if only human eyes could see what’s hidden”
– Sylvia Elle

Dr. Ralph Hruban’s words “The world is not flat” at the Pathology Day 2022 perfectly resonated with my postdoc work in Dr Cheryl Wellington’s team - and served as a motivation for sharing it with all of you. In the era of VR headsets and parallel realities, it’s only natural to embrace high-resolution large tissue imaging and machine learning approaches that are being developed around the globe. For decades, the classical 2D histological approaches served us well in stratifying disease from non-disease but more recently the need to understand the complexity and uniqueness of individual cases has prompted discussions for modern methods. 3D histopathology and imaging methods hold great promise for unravelling the salient features and mechanisms of diseases that are diffused in nature such as concussion and brain injury.

My postdoctoral research project aims to fill this gap by leveraging tissue clearing and whole-brain light sheet imaging methodologies. I have successfully set up a mouse brain clearing, imaging, and mapping with Allen Brain Institute’s atlas workflow to understand alterations in neuronal activity and axonal injury after CHIMERA experimental brain injury. Working with our master’s student Honor Cheung, we have also been able to image whole-brain 3D vascular map to identify damages in brain after injury. The cool part of this work is that this approach is not limited to brain injury models only but is also useful for understanding other neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s disease pathology.

In the past two years, Wellington lab has shared the methodology with labs across campus and have also co-hosted a workshop on Tissue clearing in 2021. UBC researchers have cleared samples ranging from brains, digits, limbs, skull to organoids. I am now in pursue of extending this work to human tissue to image pathological hallmarks in 3D!! I am happiest on the days where I can spend time on a microscope looking at “transparent” brains and generate 3D renderings of beautiful neurons.

If you would like to know more about wobbly transparent tissues or Terabytes of data or possibility to collaborate to test it for your research, feel free to reach out to Dr. Cheryl Wellington or myself .

This work would have not been possible without support from Dr Fabio Rossi and Jeff Le Due (NINC cluster at DMCBH). Also for this work, I was awarded the 2022 Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health Jock & Irene Graham Brain Research Endowment award and have been nominated by UBC for the 2023 Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship. The project is funded by a US Department of Defence grant.