In pathological diagnosis, such as for cancer, tissue specimens are embedded in paraffin, thinly sectioned, mounted on glass slides, and stained for microscopic examination. The sectioning process is essentially a form of precision micro-cutting, and the resulting tissue sections can be considered as ultra-thin chips with thicknesses of only a few micrometers. These fragile sections must be carefully stretched and attached to slides, a process that currently relies heavily on manual handling due to their delicate nature. This manual work places a considerable burden on technicians. In this study, we have developed an automated sectioning device that performs thin sectioning, stretching, and mounting of paraffin-embedded tissue specimens.
YOSHINO et al. (Wed,) studied this question.