| 研究実績の概要 |
Recent neuroscience research have shown evidences of habenula as a critical neuroanatomical hub that connects and regulates pathways associated with a range of behaviours including reproductive behaviours, central pain processing, nutrition, sleep-wake cycles, stress responses, and learning with lateral and medial habenula showing differences in connectivity and function. This research study aimed to develop a deep tissue volume optical imaging tool based on polarization sensitive-optical coherence tomography(PS-OCT)for small animal brain imaging in-vivo. The progress of the research activity so far is as follows: 1. A prototype design of polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) was attempted using deep wavelength light source at 1.7 micron specifically for brain imaging. However, the optical design had to be slightly altered due to the low light coupling efficiency into the detectors with the polarization-sensitive detection. The development work is ongoing. 2. Owing to the slight delay in the OCT imaging development, in parallel a novel 3D microscope based on fluorescence was built and successfully demonstrated that would provide structural and functional information of habenula as well as whole brain but complementary to OCT. The novel microscope was built using deep ultraviolet light combining surface excitation property with block-face imaging.
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