It's been a long time, but do most of your decalcify coronary arteries
routinely when they contain plaque?  We have a dicey project using human
coronary arteries, initially setup to use frozen sections - with
lousy success, aka sections! even with our Instrumedics)  Now trying
a D profile tungsten carbide with tape transfer, the c profile TC was not
totally successful, so new knife and temp tweaking. Finding the plaque
area does not like the tape, nor the knife edge, scrunched areas prevail.
It is a long, complicated story on what/how/why all this is being done.

I suggested they do paraffin sections to get better morphology of both
artery and plaque, with better sectioning hence the decalcification question.
I may try a surface decalcification on block face, not a favorite,
but thought some outside input from the clinical experts would be nice. 

A tutorial on plaque will also be appreciated, as I said it's been a long time
since I had to deal with these specimens, and have been trying to recall
composition of layers (fibrin, lipids?, sometimes calcium, etc).  
 

Gayle Callis
Veterinary Molecular Biology
Montana State University
Bozeman MT 59717-3610