Mosaicing of Confocal Microscopic In Vivo Soft Tissue Video Sequences

Fibered confocal microscopy allows in vivo and in situ imaging with cellular resolution. The potentiality of this imaging modality is extended in this work by using video mosaicing techniques. Two novelties are introduced. A robust estimator based on statistics for Riemannian manifolds is developed to find a globally consistent mapping of the input frames to a common coordinate system. A mosaicing framework using an e#cient scattered data fitting method is proposed in order to take into account the non-rigid deformations and the irregular sampling implied by in vivo fibered confocal microscopy. Results on 50 images of a live mouse colon demonstrate the e#ectiveness of the proposed method

Gut-Ex-Vivo system as a model to study gluten response in celiac disease

Celiac disease (CD) is a complex immune-mediated chronic disease characterized by a consistent inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract induced by gluten intake in genetically predisposed individuals. Although initiated by the interaction between digestion-derived gliadin, a gluten component, peptides, and the intestinal epithelium, the disorder is highly complex and involving other components of the intestine, such as the immune system. Therefore, conventional model systems, mainly based on two- or three-dimension cell cultures and co-cultures, cannot fully recapitulate such a complex disease. The development of mouse models has facilitated the study of different interacting cell types involved in the disorder, together with the impact of environmental factors. However, such in vivo models are often expensive and time consuming. Here we propose an organ ex vivo culture (gut-ex-vivo system) based on small intestines from gluten-sensitive mice cultivated in a dynamic condition, able to fully recapitulate the biochemical and morphological features of the mouse model exposed to gliadin (4 weeks), in 16 h. Indeed, upon gliadin exposure, we observed: i) a down-regulation of cystic fibrosis transmembrane regulator (CFTR) and an up-regulation of transglutaminase 2 (TG2) at both mRNA and protein levels; ii) increased intestinal permeability associated with deregulated tight junction protein expression; iii) induction and production of pro-inflammatory cytokines such as interleukin (IL)-15, IL-17 and interferon gamma (IFN\u3b3); and iv) consistent alteration of intestinal epithelium/villi morphology. Altogether, these data indicate that the proposed model can be efficiently used to study the pathogenesis of CD, test new or repurposed molecules to accelerate the search for new treatments, and to study the impact of the microbiome and derived metabolites, in a time- and cost- effective manner