Design Of An Automatic Instrument For Paraffin Embedded Mouse Brain Sections Collecting

The brain is an organ that regulates the functions of the body,and it is also the material basis for advanced neural activities such as consciousness,spirit,learning,memory,and intelligence.Neurons are considered to be the basic unit of the brain.To understand the working mechanism and structure of the brain,it is necessary to first obtain all the neural connections in the brain.Paraffin embedding is an embedding method used in pathological examination.It has excellent cutting performance and can be cut into complete continuous thin slices.The use of paraffin-embedded rat brains for sectioning and imaging is an effective way to obtain the complete structure of the rat brain.With the continuous development of neuroscience,the immunohistochemistry of paraffin sections of brain tissue is considered as one of the main methods for studying unknown antigens in tissues^[1].However,it is very difficult to collect the whole mouse brain slice by manual method.The easy-to-break property of paraffin slices makes the collection of slices more difficult.In order to solve this problem,this paper proposes an automatic collection scheme that uses tape to attach the sample surface for support protection and then slice and collection.In this paper,the tape collection scheme was determined for the characteristics of our slice imaging system,and the feasibility of using tape to collect the slices was verified through experiments;In addition,the patch roller for adhesive tape was designed to realize the sticking of tapes with cutting;The design of the Hall sensor detection device enabled accurate control of the tape stretching position;A better collection quality was obtained through the design of a drop-water device.Through the design of the mechanical structure,hardware circuit and control program of each module of the collection device,an automatic collection device suitable for the collection of paraffin-embedded rat brain samples was realized.In the end,the collection rate of mouse brain samples and the slicing variables were measured.The influencing factors of the collection rate were analyzed and improved experimentally,which further improved the overall performance of the device.The collection device designed in this paper realizes the automatic collection of paraffin-embedded rat brain samples.The average collection rate can reach 94.6%.The surface irregularities of the samples before and after the collection are within 3?m,which satisfies the imaging requirements of the sample surface.After the slices were collected,the deformation of the slicing direction was less than 7%,and the vertical slicing direction was less than 5%,which ensured the good morphological integrity of the slices.Collected samples were done immunohistochemistry to verify that the collected sections can be used for subsequent immunohistochemistry experiments to study regions of interest.The more detailed imaging of the collected slices can obtain more sample information and avoid data loss.