A Bird's Eye View
The complete journey — from a family's call to a researcher's stained slide.
Part One
Brain Bank staff receives calls from bereaved families, and provides assistance for arranging transport to the Mortuary for the postmortem.
Relatives are explained about the entire procedure. Documents provided by the family will be scrutinized. If documents are in order, signature of first degree relatives on Informed consent form is obtained.
Following documents should be collected from the Mortuary:
You receive the following from the Brain Bank:
What Do We Do With the Brain Collected at Postmortem?
Part Two
Each step in the exact order it happens — the science behind every donated brain.
Fresh brain extracted following postmortem
One half of the brain will be sliced for freezing at −86°C. The other half will be fixed in 10% neutral buffered formalin for examination of pathology under microscope.
Coronal sections: One half of the brain is being sliced from front to back (like bread loaf) serially. The slices are arranged serially on a dissection board, carefully examined and photographed.
The brain slices are placed carefully in Ziplock cover, each labelled with case number, and anatomical site. The ziplock bags are placed in a box and stored in a deep freezer that keeps the tissue at −86°C, awaiting use by researchers.
The Brain Bank's freezer rooms. All the freezers are connected to a temperature alarm system that is monitored 24/7.
The other half of the brain is immersed in buffered neutral formalin for a minimum of 3–4 weeks. This half of the brain is examined under a microscope by a neuropathologist to ascertain if brain tissue is normal or has any disease process, and a final diagnosis based on the examination is provided.
To examine the brain, it is first sliced and the interior of the slices are examined.
The neuropathologist makes 20–25 blocks of tissue (~2×2 cm sized) from different anatomical areas to be studied microscopically. These are then placed into labelled cassettes to "process" the tissues.
These tissue cassettes are then put into a "tissue processor" and then "embedded" in molten paraffin wax to produce a "block". The wax will harden the tissue so that it can be sliced into extremely thin sections.
A bit of brain tissue is put into a mold and embedded by paraffin wax. To the left is the freezing plate where the blocks are hardening.
Thin sections are cut from the wax blocks on a microtome.
The tissue sections are spread out on a heated water bath and are collected onto glass slides. These sections will be stained with various dyes to show the microscopic structure of the brain tissue and assess changes caused by various diseases, if any.
A set of stained sections taken from the blocks of brain tissue, showing grey matter, white matter tracts and other cellular details of the tissue.
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