shrinkage

From:Barry Rittman <brittman@mail.db.uth.tmc.edu>

The degree of shrinkage can vary considerably  between different tissues
and organs, between individual components in a tissue and with different
fixing-processing times and agents. This is especially noticeable in
blocks containing hard tissues where there is greater shrinkage of the
soft tissues.
Values in soft tissue are regarded as between 15 and 30%.
 I'm afraid that I must have deleted the original question but  if my
aging memory is correct,  this is a research project involving
morphometry. If you are going to process similar size blocks of tissue
with an identical procedure then it may not be necessary to have
absolute but rather have comparative values to compare experimental and
control sections. If your processing schedule and block size is
consistent then you may be able to ignore the shrinkage. The important
factor here is reproducibility both as regards
fixing-processing etc. and with the image analysis. If measuring blood
vessel wall thickness or lumen diameter it is also important to be able
to determine the angle of cut across the vessels as oblique sections
will have larger measurements.
You will  need control slides to determine your degree of
reproducibility of the morphometry.
Barry




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