Zebrafish brain and skull imaging based on polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

Zebrafish brain imaging is very important for the study of brain disease and regeneration. We scanned the adult zebrafish brain before and after skull removal and monitored the recovery process of a head wound by polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) in this paper. We analyzed the structure and polarization characteristics of the brain and skull in PS-OCT images, and found their internal microstructure can be clearly identified with the polarization information. Further, we estimated the pigment distribution of the skull area and found that the density of pigment in skull is a critical factor of affecting zebrafish brain in vivo polarization imaging. Our results demonstrated that more features of brain can be displayed by introducing the polarization information, and proved high-resolution PS-OCT will play a great potential role in studying the zebrafish brain and skull.