Line-scanning particle image velocimetry: an optical approach for quantifying a wide range of blood flow speeds in live animals. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • BACKGROUND: The ability to measure blood velocities is critical for studying vascular development, physiology, and pathology. A key challenge is to quantify a wide range of blood velocities in vessels deep within living specimens with concurrent diffraction-limited resolution imaging of vascular cells. Two-photon laser scanning microscopy (TPLSM) has shown tremendous promise in analyzing blood velocities hundreds of micrometers deep in animals with cellular resolution. However, current analysis of TPLSM-based data is limited to the lower range of blood velocities and is not adequate to study faster velocities in many normal or disease conditions. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We developed line-scanning particle image velocimetry (LS-PIV), which used TPLSM data to quantify peak blood velocities up to 84 mm/s in live mice harboring brain arteriovenous malformation, a disease characterized by high flow. With this method, we were able to accurately detect the elevated blood velocities and exaggerated pulsatility along the abnormal vascular network in these animals. LS-PIV robustly analyzed noisy data from vessels as deep as 850 µm below the brain surface. In addition to analyzing in vivo data, we validated the accuracy of LS-PIV up to 800 mm/s using simulations with known velocity and noise parameters. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: To our knowledge, these blood velocity measurements are the fastest recorded with TPLSM. Partnered with transgenic mice carrying cell-specific fluorescent reporters, LS-PIV will also enable the direct in vivo correlation of cellular, biochemical, and hemodynamic parameters in high flow vascular development and diseases such as atherogenesis, arteriogenesis, and vascular anomalies.

publication date

  • June 26, 2012

Research

keywords

  • Arteriovenous Malformations
  • Blood Flow Velocity
  • Brain Diseases
  • Erythrocytes
  • Microscopy, Confocal
  • Rheology

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC3383695

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 84862744069

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1371/journal.pone.0038590

PubMed ID

  • 22761686

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 7

issue

  • 6