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Updated: Feb 15, 2026

Intravital Longitudinal Imaging of Vascular Dynamics in the Calvarial Bone Marrow
Published on: April 11, 2025
[Intravital bone imaging:osteoclast.]
Junichi Kikuta1, Masaru Ishii1
1Department of Immunology and Cell Biology, Graduate School of Medicine and Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University, Japan.
Abstract:
Osteoclasts are bone-resorbing giant polykaryons that differentiate from mononuclear macrophage/monocyte-lineage hematopoietic precursors. We have originally established an advanced imaging system for visualizing the in vivo behavior of mature osteoclasts in living bone tissues with intravital multiphoton microscopy. By means of this system, we could grasp the real time-course of osteoclastic bone resorption, and identified two distinct functional states of differentiated osteoclasts, 'bone-resorptive' and 'non-resorptive'. Intravital imaging also revealed that various biologic drugs acted directly on mature osteoclasts during inflammatory bone destruction. In this review, we show the latest data of intravital imaging of osteoclast dynamics.
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