Accurate assessment of cerebral microvascular flow is crucial for understanding brain functioning and neurovascular diseases. Dynamic Light Scattering Optical Coherence Tomography (DLS-OCT) has been used to obtain blood velocity measurements in a large number of microvascular segments, including arterioles, capillaries, and venules in anesthetized mice. However, anesthesia induces large changes in the microvascular blood flow. Imaging awake animals by DLS-OCT is preferable, but very challenging due to motion artifacts. Here, we present the first DLS-OCT measurements of cortical microvascular blood flow in awake mice, made possible by an innovative algorithm based on Vertical Displacement at Inflection (IVD) in velocity distribution.
SignificanceThe accurate large-scale mapping of cerebral microvascular blood flow velocity is crucial for a better understanding of cerebral blood flow (CBF) regulation. Although optical imaging techniques enable both high-resolution microvascular angiography and fast absolute CBF velocity measurements in the mouse cortex, they usually require different imaging techniques with independent system configurations to maximize their performances. Consequently, it is still a challenge to accurately combine functional and morphological measurements to co-register CBF speed distribution from hundreds of microvessels with high-resolution microvascular angiograms.AimWe propose a data acquisition and processing framework to co-register a large set of microvascular blood flow velocity measurements from dynamic light scattering optical coherence tomography (DLS-OCT) with the corresponding microvascular angiogram obtained using two-photon microscopy (2PM).ApproachWe used DLS-OCT to first rapidly acquire a large set of microvascular velocities through a sealed cranial window in mice and then to acquire high-resolution microvascular angiograms using 2PM. The acquired data were processed in three steps: (i) 2PM angiogram coregistration with the DLS-OCT angiogram, (ii) 2PM angiogram segmentation and graphing, and (iii) mapping of the CBF velocities to the graph representation of the 2PM angiogram.ResultsWe implemented the developed framework on the three datasets acquired from the mice cortices to facilitate the coregistration of the large sets of DLS-OCT flow velocity measurements with 2PM angiograms. We retrieved the distributions of red blood cell velocities in arterioles, venules, and capillaries as a function of the branching order from precapillary arterioles and postcapillary venules from more than 1000 microvascular segments.ConclusionsThe proposed framework may serve as a useful tool for quantitative analysis of large microvascular datasets obtained by OCT and 2PM in studies involving normal brain functioning, progression of various diseases, and numerical modeling of the oxygen advection and diffusion in the realistic microvascular networks.
Although the beneficial effects of regular physical exercise on brain aging and neurodegenerative diseases are well recognized, a clear understanding of how exercise leads to such benefits remains elusive. In this work, we investigated the effects of normal aging on cortical microvascular oxygenation, perfusion, and morphology and the impact of four months of voluntary wheel running on cortical microvascular oxygenation in 20 months old mice. We used two-photon microscopy to assess age-related and exercise-induced changes in the distributions of capillary oxygen partial pressure (PO2) and red-blood-cell flux across cortical depth in awake mice. Our finding suggests the mitigating effect of exercise on the progression of age-related changes in capillary oxygenation in deeper cortical layers which may be related to health-enhancing benefits of exercise in elderly individuals.
We report the implementation and demonstration of an imaging system that combines two-photon phosphorescence lifetime microscopy (2PLM) and adaptive optics for improving oxygen partial pressure (pO2) measurement accuracy in deep cortical layers of mice. The technique retrieves the background signal by forming an aberrated torus focus on the sample plane with an optical phase mask imposed on the system wavefront and subtracts it from normal phosphorescence emission signal. The proposed method is validated with intravascular pO2 measurements from six mice imaged at up to ~600 μm depth.
We present a framework to coregister a large set of blood flow measurements from the cortical microvascular segments obtained by DLS-OCT with the microvascular angiogram obtained using TPM. By using this framework, we estimated the distributions of the mean RBC velocities in arterioles, venules, and capillaries, and as a function of the branching order from over 1,000 microvascular segments. The developed tools will help with more quantitative analysis of the large data sets obtained by OCT and TPM in the studies involving normal brain functioning, progression of various diseases, and numerical modeling of the oxygen transport in the microvascular networks.
For early detection and targeted therapy, receptor expression profiling is instrumental to classifying breast cancer into
sub-groups. In particular, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) expression has been shown to have both
prognostic and predictive values. Recently, an increasingly more complex view of HER2 in breast cancer has emerged
from genome sequencing that highlights the role of inter- and intra-tumor heterogeneity in therapy resistance. Studies on
such heterogeneity demand high-content, high-resolution functional and molecular imaging in vivo, which cannot be
achieved using any single imaging tool. Clearly, there is a critical need to develop a multimodality approach for breast
cancer imaging. Since 2006, grating-based x-ray imaging has been developed for much-improved x-ray images. In 2014,
the demonstration of fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) guided by x-ray grating-based micro-CT was reported
with encouraging results and major drawbacks. In this paper, we propose to integrate grating-based x-ray tomography
(GXT) and high-dimensional optical tomography (HOT) into the first-of-its-kind truly-fused GXT-HOT (pronounced as
“Get Hot”) system for imaging of breast tumor heterogeneity, HER2 expression and dimerization, and therapeutic
response. The primary innovation lies in developing a brand-new high-content, high-throughput x-ray optical imager
based on several contemporary techniques to have MRI-type soft tissue contrast, PET-like sensitivity and specificity, and
micro-CT-equivalent resolution. This system consists of two orthogonal x-ray Talbot-Lau interferometric imaging chains
and a hyperspectral time-resolved single-pixel optical imager. Both the system design and pilot results will be reported in
this paper, along with relevant issues under further investigation.
Single-pixel imaging based on compressive sensing theory has been a highlighted technique in the biomedical imaging field for many years. This interest has been driven by the possibility of performing microscopic or macroscopic imaging based on low-cost detector arrays, increased SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) in the acquired data sets and the ability to perform high quality image reconstruction with compressed data sets by exploiting signal sparsity. In this work, we present our recent work in implementing this technique to perform time domain fluorescence-labeled investigations in preclinical settings. More precisely, we report on our time-resolved hyperspectral single-pixel camera for fast, wide-field mapping of molecular labels and lifetime-based quantification. The hyperspectral single-pixel camera implements a DMD (Digital micro-mirror device) to generate optical masks for modulating the illumination field before it is delivered onto the sample and focuses the emission light signals into a multi-anode hyperspectral time-resolved PMT (Photomultiplier tube) to acquire spatial, temporal and spectral information enriched 4-D data sets. Fluorescence dyes with lifetime and spectral contrast are embedded in well plates and thin tissues. L-1 norm based regularization or the least square method, is applied to solve the underdetermined inverse problem during image reconstruction. These experimental results prove the possibility of fast, wide-field mapping of fluorescent labels with lifetime and spectral contrast in thin media.
KEYWORDS: Data acquisition, Absorption, Digital Light Processing, Imaging systems, Monte Carlo methods, Diffuse optical tomography, Luminescence, Scattering, Digital micromirror devices, Structured light
Time-resolved Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) has experienced rapid progress in recent years. It is a powerful
functional imaging technique that allows acquiring abundant quantitative optical information from turbid media.
However, the application of time domain DOT systems is hampered by the tradeoff between gathering dense data sets
and practical acquisition times. Recently, wide-field structured illumination patterns have been applied in time-resolved
DOT platforms to drastically accelerate the data acquisition process. In this work, we present a novel structured light
based imaging strategy for DOT that can generate time domain datasets enriched by hyperspectral information with short
data acquisition times. We employ two digital light processors to generate wide-field imaging pattern both in the
illumination and detection channels to capture tomographic data sets over large areas. The hyperspectral data sets are
acquired using a time-resolved spectrophotometer built around a multi-anode photomultiplier tube (PMT) that can detect
photons in 16 wavelength channels simultaneously based on time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) technique.
The characteristics of the system are tested in the spatial, temporal and spectral dimensions. The performance of the
imaging system is validated through preliminary 3D reconstruction of absorption heterogeneity distribution within a
murine model phantom. The application of digital light modulators in illumination and detection combined with timeresolved
PMT spectrophotometer enables our system to acquire dense time domain data sets both in the spatial, temporal
and spectral dimensions at an unprecedented speed. The phantom validation shows that proposed strategy is a promising
technique for fast, high resolution, quantitative three dimensional volumetric imaging.
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