Volume 36, Issue 4, 2020

  [Cover]

The morphological alterations of microvessels under both normal and seizure conditions might be essential for investigating the pathogenesis and development of epilepsy. Xiao and Zhang et al., by firstly applying synchrotron radiation-based X-ray in-line phase-contrast imaging and quantitative 3-D characterization without any contrast-enhancing agents to discover 3-D hippocampal microvascular remodeling alongside the progression of epilepsy, found that the number of microvessels was markedly increased on days 1 and 14, but decreased on day 60 after seizures. The surface area, diameter distribution, mean tortuosity, and number of bifurcations and network segments also showed similar trends. The cover image indicates the 3-D angioarchitecture of the hippocampus. Continuous pseudo-color changes are used to depict the distribution spectrum of vessel diameters, ranging from 10 μm to 100 μm. See pages 333–345. (Cover image provided by Prof. Bo Xiao and Mengqi Zhang).