In vivo wide-area cellular imaging by side-view endomicroscopy

Abstract

A side-view endoscope permits the imaging of large fields of gastrointestinal and respiratory mucosa at high resolution in the mouse. The approach is applied to imaging changes during inflammation and tumor progression in the living mouse. In vivo imaging of small animals offers several possibilities for studying normal and disease biology, but visualizing organs with single-cell resolution is challenging. We describe rotational side-view confocal endomicroscopy, which enables cellular imaging of gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts in mice and may be extensible to imaging organ parenchyma such as cerebral cortex. We monitored cell infiltration, vascular changes and tumor progression during inflammation and tumorigenesis in colon over several months.