PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Marius Reichardt AU - Patrick Møller Jensen AU - Vedrana Andersen Dahl AU - Anders Bjorholm Dahl AU - Maximilian Ackermann AU - Harshit Shah AU - Florian Länger AU - Christopher Werlein AU - Mark Kühnel AU - Danny Jonigk AU - Tim Salditt TI - 3D virtual Histopathology of Cardiac Tissue from Covid-19 Patients based on Phase-Contrast X-ray Tomography AID - 10.1101/2021.09.16.460594 DP - 2021 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 2021.09.16.460594 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/09/18/2021.09.16.460594.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/09/18/2021.09.16.460594.full AB - For the first time, we have used phase-contrast x-ray tomography to characterize the three-dimensional (3d) structure of cardiac tissue from patients who succumbed to Covid-19. By extending conventional histopatholocigal examination by a third dimension, the delicate pathological changes of the vascular system of severe Covid-19 progressions can be analyzed, fully quantified and compared to other types of viral myocarditis and controls. To this end, cardiac samples with a cross section of 3.5mm were scanned at the synchrotron in a parallel beam configuration. The vascular network was segmented by a deep learning architecture suitable for 3d datasets (V-net), trained by sparse manual annotations. Pathological alterations of vessels, concerning the variation of diameters and the amount of small holes, were observed, indicative of elevated occurrence of intussusceptive angiogenesis, also confirmed by scanning electron microscopy. Further, we implemented a fully automated analysis of the tissue structure in form of shape measures based on the structure tensor. The corresponding distributions show that the histopathology of Covid-19 differs from both influenza and typical coxsackie virus myocarditis.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.