Monitoring of blood and lymph circulation in the denervated small intestine based on multimodal optical coherence tomography data

Abstract

In the paper we demonstrate the applicability of optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) and optical coherence tomography lymphangiography (OCTL) to investigate changes in intramural blood and lymph flow of the small intestine in an experimental model of spinal trauma with sympathetic denervation of the gut. Resection of sympathetic ganglia was performed in rabbits using the retroperitoneal approach. Lymph and blood circulation in the small intestine wall was evaluated before and after the spinal trauma. For OCTL images the signal attenuation coefficient was quantitatively analyzed, and the areas that did not scatter or absorb light in the infrared range were assigned to the lymph. It was shown that the changes in blood microcirulation are significant, hovewer the significance of changes in lymhatic vessels density is hard to estimate due to high variations of data.