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Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is still a poorly understood neurological syndrome showing muscle impairment and leading to death because of respiratory failure. Recently, a new, transgenic swine model overexpressing the human superoxide-dismutase 1 gene, promised the chance to investigate animals before disease onset, and we planned to investigate vascular alterations that we recently learned to quantify. In order to address for feasibility, we checked angioarchitectures in spinal cord samples of at least one animal for each of three health conditions: healthy, asymptomatic, clear motor symptoms. Furthermore, analyses were carried out in three different regions: cervical, thoracic and lumbar districts.

            In our approach, we relied on described ImageJ automatic routines, measuring amounts and dispersion of microvascular structures, classified according to their calibers and in spite of the low height of the sample slice. As in previous papers, we investigated amount and volume dispersion of 7 progressively reconstructed angioarchitectures, built from larger calibers through addition of vessels or voxels of smaller and smaller caliber. Results were processed by linear regression to depict a 2D summary pattern, specific for that micro-angioarchitecture.

            Healthy samples presented well dispersed vascular layouts, depicted by near-flat linear regressions. However, they were characterized by large dispersion variances, apparently due to district of origin of the sample itself. On the contrary, results from pathological samples presented lines with increased slopes while retaining the observed inter-sample dispersion variances. Absence of samples from different animals in the same health status prevented us to observe inter-animal variances. Therefore, we could not derive significant biological conclusions on reduced vascularization. Nevertheless, results demonstrated the success of our image analysis approach and provided a “tantalizing” observation of vascular alterations in a swine model for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.