Ear skin optical clearing for improving blood flow imaging/Optisches Clearing der Ohrhaut zur verbesserten Bildgebung des Blutflusses
AbstractVarious optical imaging techniques have shown a great potential for monitoring angiogenesis, development of blood vessels, and even tumor transfer, but they suffer from the limited imaging depth in tissue. Although the mouse ear provides an available window, the residual scattering of ear skin still influences the imaging quality. The proposed tissue optical clearing technique presents a new opportunity to decrease the scattering of skin, and enhance the imaging contrast or imaging depth of optical methods. The purpose of this study is to develop an innovative ear skin optical clearing agent (ESOCA) for improving the transparency of the mouse ear.The ESOCA was topically applied on the ear skin of BALB/c miceThe transmittance of mice ear was enhanced by 111.0±8.2% at 633 nm after application of ESOCA. The cutaneous blood vessels and blood flow could be distinguished more clearly with LSCI technique. In addition, the calculated CNR values of speckle contrast images showed a great enhancement compared with the initial (control) values.In summary, topical application of an innovative ESOCA permits the vessel structure and flow distribution information of cutaneous blood vessels to be imaged by LSCI with higher contrast, which will be significant for tumor studies in the future.