mammalian embryos

Abstract: Live imaging of normal and abnormal vascular de-velopment in mammalian embryos is important tool in embry-onic research, which can potentially contribute to understand-ing, prevention and treatment of cardiovascular birth defects. Here, we used speckle variance analysis of swept source opti-cal coherence tomography (OCT) data sets acquired from live mouse embryos to reconstruct the 3-D structure of the embry-onic vasculature. Both Doppler OCT and speckle variance algo-rithms were used to reconstruct the vascular structure. The re-sults demonstrates that speckle variance imaging provides more accurate representation of the vascular structure, as it is not sen-sitive to the blood flow direction, while the Doppler OCT imag-ing 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. 500 μm Speckle variance reconstruction showing the yolk sac vascula-ture c © 2011 by Astro Ltd