Fig. 6

Elastic registration of histology and SEM. (A) H&E-stained section of the analyzed 4 mm diameter tissue cylinder from the paraffin embedded lung tissue. Rectangles indicate two exemplary regions that have been analyzed by SEM. (B) and (C) show the same region of cartilage imaged via histology and a checkerboard visualization of the achieved registration quality respectively. (D) shows the SEM data of the region indicated by the yellow box in (C). Clearly the lacunae (black arrow) and a chondrocyte (asterisk) within the cartilage can be seen in detail. (E) to (F) show the same perfect overlay for a second alveolar region of interest. (G) shows the SEM data of the region depicted by the yellow box in (F). The extremely high resolution and the topographic information of SEM allowed to identify individual elastin cable elements (white arrow heads). To achieve the overlap between SEM and LM, no deformation needed to be compensated to match the data, demonstrating the most significant benefit of the same-slide SEM technique. Bars represent 1 mm in (A); 0.1 mm in (B, C, E and F) and 0.02 mm in (D) and (G).