Abstract. Studying hemodynamic changes during early mammalian embryonic development is critical for further advances in prevention, diagnostics, and treatment of congenital cardiovascular ͑CV͒ birth defects and diseases. Doppler optical coherence tomography ͑OCT͒ has been shown to provide sensitive measurements of blood flow in avian and amphibian embryos. We combined Doppler swept-source optical coherence tomography ͑DSS-OCT͒ and live mouse embryo culture to analyze blood flow dynamics in early embryos. SS-OCT structural imaging was used for the reconstruction of embryo morphology and the orientation of blood vessels, which is required for calculating flow velocity from the Doppler measurements. Spatially and temporally resolved blood flow profiles are presented for the dorsal aorta and a yolk sac vessel in a 9.5-day embryo. We demonstrate that DSS-OCT can be successfully used for structural analysis and spatially and temporally resolved hemodynamic measurements in developing early mammalian embryos.

Live imaging of normal and abnormal vascular development in mammalian embryos is important tool in embryonic research, which can potentially contribute to understanding, prevention and treatment of cardiovascular birth defects. Here, we used speckle variance analysis of swept source optical coherence tomography (OCT) data sets acquired from live mouse embryos to reconstruct the 3-D structure of the embryonic vasculature. Both Doppler OCT and speckle variance algorithms were used to reconstruct the vascular structure. The results demonstrates that speckle variance imaging provides more accurate representation of the vascular structure, as it is not sensitive to the blood flow direction, while the Doppler OCT imaging misses blood flow component perpendicular to the beam direction. These studies suggest that speckle variance imaging is a promising tool to study vascular development in cultured mouse embryos. μmSpeckle variance reconstruction showing the yolk sac vasculature

We present a systematic analysis of the accuracy of five different methods for extracting the biomechanical properties of soft samples using optical coherence elastography (OCE). OCE is an emerging noninvasive technique, which allows assessing biomechanical properties of tissues with a micrometer spatial resolution. However, in order to accurately extract biomechanical properties from OCE measurements, application of proper mechanical model is required. In this study, we utilize tissue-mimicking phantoms with controlled elastic properties and investigate the feasibilities of four available methods for reconstructing elasticity (Young’s modulus) based on OCE measurements of an air-pulse induced elastic wave. The approaches are based on the shear wave equation (SWE), the surface wave equation (SuWE), Rayleigh-Lamb frequency equation (RLFE), and finite element method (FEM), Elasticity values were compared with uniaxial mechanical testing. The results show that the RLFE and the FEM are more robust in quantitatively assessing elasticity than the other simplified models. This study provides a foundation and reference for reconstructing the biomechanical properties of tissues from OCE data, which is important for the further development of noninvasive elastography methods.

Topical trans-dermal delivery of drugs has proven to be a promising route for treatment of many dermatological diseases. The aim of this study is to monitor and quantify the permeability rate of glucose solutions in rhesus monkey skin noninvasively in vivo as a primate model for drug diffusion. A time-domain Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) system was used to image the diffusion of glucose in the skin of anesthetized monkeys for which the permeability rate was calculated. From 5 experiments on 4 different monkeys, the permeability for glucose-20% was found to be (4.41 ± 0.28) 10 −6 cm/sec. The results suggest that OCT might be utilized for the noninvasive study of molecular diffusion in the multilayered biological tissues in vivo.

Mouse models of ocular diseases provide a powerful resource for exploration of molecular regulation of eye development and pre-clinical studies. Availability of a live high-resolution imaging method for mouse embryonic eyes would significantly enhance longitudinal analyses and high-throughput morphological screening. We demonstrate that optical coherence tomography (OCT) can be used for live embryonic ocular imaging throughout gestation. At all studied stages, the whole eye is within the imaging distance of the system and there is a good optical contrast between the structures. We also performed OCT eye imaging in the embryonic retinoblastoma mouse model Pax6-SV40 T-antigen, which spontaneously forms lens and retinal lesions, and demonstrate that OCT allows us to clearly differentiate between the mutant and wild type phenotypes. These results demonstrate that OCTin utero imaging is a potentially useful tool to study embryonic ocular diseases in mouse models.