Chronic Imaging of Mouse Brain: From Optical Systems to Functional Ultrasound.

Utilization of functional ultrasound (fUS) in cerebral vascular imaging is gaining popularity among neuroscientists. In this article, we describe a chronic surgical preparation method that allows longitudinal studies and therefore is applicable to a wide range of studies, especially on aging, stroke, and neurodegenerative diseases. This method can also be used with awake mice; hence, the deleterious effects of anesthesia on neurovascular responses can be avoided. In addition to fUS imaging, this surgical preparation allows researchers to take advantage of common optical imaging methods to acquire complementary datasets to help increase the technical rigor of studies. © 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC. Basic Protocol 1: Surgical preparation of mouse chronic cranial windows using polymethylpentene Basic Protocol 2: Imaging of mice with chronic cranial windows.

Awake chronic mouse model of targeted pial vessel occlusion via photothrombosis.

Animal models of stroke are used extensively to study the mechanisms involved in the acute and chronic phases of recovery following stroke. A translatable animal model that closely mimics the mechanisms of a human stroke is essential in understanding recovery processes as well as developing therapies that improve functional outcomes. We describe a photothrombosis stroke model that is capable of targeting a single distal pial branch of the middle cerebral artery with minimal damage to the surrounding parenchyma in awake head-fixed mice. Mice are implanted with chronic cranial windows above one hemisphere of the brain that allow optical access to study recovery mechanisms for over a month following occlusion. Additionally, we study the effect of laser spot size used for occlusion and demonstrate that a spot size with small axial and lateral resolution has the advantage of minimizing unwanted photodamage while still monitoring macroscopic changes to cerebral blood flow during photothrombosis. We show that temporally guiding illumination using real-time feedback of blood flow dynamics also minimized unwanted photodamage to the vascular network. Finally, through quantifiable behavior deficits and chronic imaging we show that this model can be used to study recovery mechanisms or the effects of therapeutics longitudinally.

Anatomical Modeling of Brain Vasculature in Two-Photon Microscopy by Generalizable Deep Learning.

Objective and Impact Statement. Segmentation of blood vessels from two-photon microscopy (2PM) angiograms of brains has important applications in hemodynamic analysis and disease diagnosis. Here, we develop a generalizable deep learning technique for accurate 2PM vascular segmentation of sizable regions in mouse brains acquired from multiple 2PM setups. The technique is computationally efficient, thus ideal for large-scale neurovascular analysis. Introduction. Vascular segmentation from 2PM angiograms is an important first step in hemodynamic modeling of brain vasculature. Existing segmentation methods based on deep learning either lack the ability to generalize to data from different imaging systems or are computationally infeasible for large-scale angiograms. In this work, we overcome both these limitations by a method that is generalizable to various imaging systems and is able to segment large-scale angiograms. Methods. We employ a computationally efficient deep learning framework with a loss function that incorporates a balanced binary-cross-entropy loss and total variation regularization on the network's output. Its effectiveness is demonstrated on experimentally acquired in vivo angiograms from mouse brains of dimensions up to 808×808×702 µm. Results. To demonstrate the superior generalizability of our framework, we train on data from only one 2PM microscope and demonstrate high-quality segmentation on data from a different microscope without any network tuning. Overall, our method demonstrates 10× faster computation in terms of voxels-segmented-per-second and 3× larger depth compared to the state-of-the-art. Conclusion. Our work provides a generalizable and computationally efficient anatomical modeling framework for brain vasculature, which consists of deep learning-based vascular segmentation followed by graphing. It paves the way for future modeling and analysis of hemodynamic response at much greater scales that were inaccessible before.