Serial Optical Coherence Tomography for Ex-Vivo Whole Mouse Brain

Abstract

Physical sectioning microscopy has been spotlighted as a pioneering technique for imaging large-scale biological tissue. As the name suggests, it physically removes tissue to expose deeper volume of the tissue while images the newly exposed tissue volume. Thus, the physical sectioning microscopy enables light microscopy to image whole organs such as brain. In the past decade, even though a lot of physical sectioning microscopies have been introduced, there has been no technique to examine label-free whole mouse brain. In this study, we proposed a new physical sectioning microscopy based on optical coherence tomography which performs high-resolution tomographic imaging of label-free biological tissue, and we named it serial optical coherece tomography (SOCT). Using our method, we successively visualized the entire structure of label-free mouse brains. Moreover, the 3D morphology of brain structures such as hippocampus and corpus callosum were investigated and quantified. Our results indicate that SOCT has great potential to identify the morphological changes in whole mouse brain in healthy and disease.