Abstract

Because of the ease in generating transgenic/gene knock out models and accessibility to early stages of embryogenesis, mouse and rat models have become invaluable to studying the mechanisms that underlie human birth defects. To study precisely how structural birth defects arise, Ultrasound, MRI, microCT, Optical Projection Tomography (OPT), Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and histological methods have all been used for imaging mouse/rat embryos. However, of these methods, only OCT enables live, functional imaging with high spatial resolution. Here we demonstrate advantages of OCT for live imaging of mammalian embryos at different developmental stages (ranging from E7.5 to E19.5) with nearly cellular resolution ex vivo and in utero.

© 2013 Optical Society of America