Figure 2
From: Investigation of the direct and indirect mechanisms of primary blast insult to the brain
Representative images of immunohistochemical- and histopathological-stained coronal brain slices. In both the direct- and indirect-mechanism studies, we conducted immunohistochemical analyses on the coronal brain slices harvested from control and blast-exposed rats to assess the distribution of astrocytes, microglia, and neuronal cells using GFAP, Iba-1, and NeuN staining, respectively. In addition, we conducted histopathological analyses using silver staining to assess for neuronal degeneration. After staining, we digitized each coronal brain slice with a 10-× magnification using bright-field for histopathological analysis and fluorescence filters for immunohistochemical analyses. (A) Representative images of each staining assessment in a coronal brain slice located at − 2 mm relative to Bregma. (B,C) The magnified insets show examples of stained cells in coronal brain slices of control and blast-exposed rats (B) in the direct-mechanism study and (C) in the indirect-mechanism study. Note that the images in panel (C) representative of the indirect mechanism are not illustrated here in high resolution because the acquisition software in this study did not allow us to export the high-resolution images used in the analysis.
