Fig 2.
Histology examples and quantification. The histology and immunohistochemistry data demonstrate findings of pathology performed on the animals at 24 h and 1-week time points post stroke. (A). The H&E showed predominantly large edematous areas at 24 h in all groups. This could also be observed in the luxol fast blue staining, which allows the differentiation of white matter tracts in the brain and eases the visualization of structural changes. Glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), a marker for determination of glial cell activation could not be observed at the 24 h time point, denoting a lack of neuroinflammation. The 1-week evaluations using H&E confirmed a reduction of the edema in all groups. Luxol blue further corroborated these reductions and showed a smaller infarct core in comparison to 24 h. GFAP showed activated glial cells confirming neuroinflammation around the ischemic core (boxes). The boxes specifically shown for GFAP demonstrate the lack of glial cell activation at the early stroke time point. A capsule of activated glia could often be observed in most of the regions surrounding the stroke core 1 week after stroke (B). A quantification of the stroke areas drawn at 24 h and 1-week time points by a pathologist using H&E estimated 50% reduction of the median stroke area (n=9 per group). ANOVA did not find significant differences between both time points. (C). Signal intensity of T2-weighted (T2W) images of the stroke regions belonging to the mismatch between the Manual region of interest (ROI) at 24 h and the histological ground truth found at 1-week post stroke (n=9 per group). There was a significant signal intensity reduction (P=0.04), representative of reduced water content in the regions consistent with subduing edema. The boxplots present several measures in symbols: Mean (+), median (red line), 1st quartile of the data (box upper border), 3rd quartile of the data (box lower border) and 15% outmost border of the dataset (whisker).