Improved Liver Intravital Microscopic Imaging Using a Film-Assisted Stabilization Method

Intravital microscopy (IVM) is a valuable method for biomedical characterization of dynamic processes, which has been applied to many fields such as neuroscience, oncology, and immunology. During IVM, vibration suppression is a major challenge due to the inevitable respiration and heartbeat from live animals. In this study, taking liver IVM as an example, we have unraveled the vibration inhibition effect of liquid bridges by studying the friction characteristics of a moist surface on the mouse liver. We confirmed the presence of liquid bridges on the liver through fluorescence imaging, which can provide microscale and nondestructive liquid connections between adjacent surfaces. Liquid bridges were constructed to sufficiently stabilize the liver after abdominal dissection by covering it with a polymer film, taking advantage of the high adhesion properties of liquid bridges. We further prototyped a microscope-integrated vibration-damping device with adjustable film tension to simplify the sample preparation procedure, which remarkably decreased the liver vibration. In practical application scenarios, we observed the process of liposome phagocytosis by liver Kupffer cells with significantly improved image and video quality. Collectively, our method not only provided a feasible solution to vibration suppression in the field of IVM, but also has the potential to be applied to vibration damping of precision instruments or other fields that require nondestructive ″soft″ vibration damping.