Application of tissue microarray for atherectomized tissues from peripheral arterial disease.

It is not easy to apply tissue microarray (TMA) to atherectomized tissues from peripheral arterial disease because of their physical properties. We introduce a new TMA application technique for atherectomized tissues. Using a pre-made plastic TMA cassette and TMA punch device, we successfully made the TMA block containing 40 vertically oriented atherectomized tissue samples from 10 patients. The histogram of surface areas of tissue cores in the TMA showed a bell-shaped distribution, whereas that of conventionally embedded tissues showed wide distribution. This finding suggests that the TMA method might be a better way of vertical embedding than the conventional method. A TMA block prepared by our method enabled a simultaneous evaluation of the histopathology of vertically oriented atherectomized tissues and the correlation between them with intravascular ultrasound image. In addition, this new method might be applied to various tissues in different ways.