Ellipsoidal mesoscale mineralization pattern in human cortical bone revealed in 3D by plasma focused ion beam serial sectioning

Visualizing bone mineralization and collagen fibril organization at intermediate scales between the nanometer and the hundreds of microns range, is still an important challenge. Similarly, visualizing cellular components which locally affect the tissue structure requires a precision of a few tens of nanometers at maximum while spanning several tens of micrometers. In the last decade, gallium focused ion beam (FIB) equipped with a scanning …