The use of the milling machine for preparing bone sections for microradiography and microautoradiography

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Undecalcified bone can be embedded in Perspex in an oven which is designed to hasten the polymerization of the Perspex monomer so that short-lived isotopes may be studied. The sections are cut on an engineer's milling machine to 100 μ and ground to approximately 50 μ on ground glass. The sections are then X-rayed and autoradiographed so that the degree of calcification and the uptake of different isotopes may be correlated, the autoradiographic film being left on the sections so that the exact localization of the isotope may be determined. Both large-grained X-ray film and fine-grained autoradiographic film are used, depending on the concentration of isotope in the bone. This method can be used for hard adult cortical bone with satisfactory results.