Whole brain vascular imaging in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease with two-photon microscopy

Given known correlations between vascular health and cognitive impairment, the development of tools to image microvasculature in the whole brain could help investigate these correlations. We explore the feasibility of using an automated serial two-photon microscope to image fluorescent gelatin-filled whole rodent brains in three-dimensions (3-D) with the goal of carrying group studies. Vascular density (VD) was computed using automatic segmentation combined with coregistration techniques to build a group-level vascular metric in the whole brain. Focusing on the medial prefrontal cortex, cerebral cortex, the olfactory bulb, and the hippocampal formation, we compared the VD of three age groups (2-, 4.5-, and 8-months-old), for both wild type mice and a transgenic model (APP/PS1) with pathology resembling Alzheimer's disease (AD). We report a general loss of VD caused by the aging process with a small VD increase in the diseased animals in the somatomotor and somatosensory cortical regions and the olfactory bulb, partly supported by MRI perfusion data. This study supports previous observations that AD transgenic mice show a higher VD in specific regions compared with WT mice during the early and late stages of the disease (4.5 to 8 months), extending results to whole brain mapping.