Abstract
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) has emerged as an advanced in vivo imaging modality, which is widely used for the clinic ophthalmology and neuroscience research in the rodent brain cortex among others. Based on the high numerical aperture (NA) probing lens and the motion-corrected algorithms, a high-resolution imaging technique called OCT micro-angiography is applied to resolve the small blood capillary vessels ranging from 5[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m to 10[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m in diameter. As OCT-based techniques are recently evolving further from the structural imaging of capillaries toward spatio-temporal dynamic imaging of blood flow in capillaries, here we present a review on the latest techniques for the dynamic flow imaging. Studies on capillary blood flow using these techniques will help us better understand the roles of capillary blood flow for normal functioning of the brain as well as how it malfunctions in diseases.
Highlights
Capillaries spreading over the whole body and linked to the arteria and veins play an important role on normal functioning and a range of dysfunctions of the central nervous system
Functional magnetic resonance imaging existing for a long time has been used to investigate the neurovascular coupling to understand the cerebral energy supply regulation based on the interpretation of human neuroimaging data, while the spatial resolution of fMRI is restricted to the scope at sub-millimeter level.[9,10]
The poor resolution of fMRI prevents the observation of small capillary vessels, which ranges 5–10 m in diameter
Summary
Capillaries spreading over the whole body and linked to the arteria and veins play an important role on normal functioning and a range of dysfunctions of the central nervous system. Two-photon microscopy has been used for capillary blood °ow measurement in the rodent brain cortex with the micrometer resolution.[13] the scanning mechanism of this method requires continuous acquisition of the signal from axed location of a capillary to capture the passage of red blood cells (RBCs) through, which makes it di±cult to investigate a large number of capillaries at the same time.[14] these techniques based on °uorescence make it di±cult to perform a longitudinal investigation in the same animal along the lifespan which is often desired for studying slowly developing vascular deciency. It has motivated researchers to develop di®erent approaches based on OCT for quantitative imaging of RBC °ow in small blood capillary vessels. This review will serve as a technical guide for researchers who are interested in using the latest OCT techniques for neuroscience research in animal models
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