STATISTICALLY VALID PROCEDURES WILL BE DEVELOPED FOR A READILY ACCESSIBLE, USER-FRIENDLY PC-BASED SYSTEM TO QUANTITATIVELY ANALYZE AND CORRELATE SERIAL IMAGES FROM RADIOLABELED BRAIN SECTIONS.

STATISTICALLY VALID PROCEDURES WILL BE DEVELOPED FOR A READILY ACCESSIBLE, USER-FRIENDLY PC-BASED SYSTEM TO QUANTITATIVELY ANALYZE AND CORRELATE SERIAL IMAGES FROM RADIOLABELED BRAIN SECTIONS. THE UTILITY OF THESE PROCEDURES WILL BE ESTABLISHED BY THE CORRELATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF OPIATE DEPENDENCE AND WITHDRAWAL IN RECONSTRUCTION OF SERIAL IMAGES AVOIDS PROBLEMS INVOLVED IN SAMPLING SO-CALLED REPRESENTATIVE TISSUE SECTIONS. NEUROCHEMICAL HETEROGENEITY WITHIN MORPHOLOGICALLY HOMOGENEOUS REGIONS CAN BE EASILY DISCERNED AND REGIONAL CHARACTERISTICS CAN BE VIEWED AS A PART OF A NEURAL SYSTEM RATHER THAN ISOLATED CELL GROUPS. SECOND, RECONSTRUCTION MAKES COMPARISONS BETWEEN ANIMALS MORE RELIABLE BY PRESENTING DATA IN A 3-D ARRAY WHERE COORDINATES RELATE TO SPECIFIC ANATOMICAL LANDMARKS. THIRD, THE PRECISION OF THE QUANTITATIVE PROCEDURES CAN BE INCREASED SINCE THE DATA WITHIN A SPECIFICALLY DEFINED REGION CAN BE INTEGRATED. FINALLY, SINCE MAPPING STATISTICS CAN BE APPLIED, THE RELATION BETWEEN THE FEATURES OBTAINED USING THE DIFFERENT PROCEDURES CAN BE RELIABLY QUANTITATED AND VERIFIED. THUS, EXPERIMENTS THAT WERE PREVIOUSLY PROHIBITIVE, DUE TO THE LABOR-INTENSIVE PROCEDURES INVOLVED, CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED AND ANATOMICAL AND NEUROCHEMICAL DATA THAT COULD PREVIOUSLY ONLY BE ANECDOTALLY RELATED