"Top Downloads from December 2021" in Optics Letters, and selected as "Spotlight on Optics"
Recently, our paper titled "Detachable head-mounted photoacoustic microscope in freely moving mice" was elected into the "Top Downloads from December 2021" in Optics Letters, and selected as "Spotlight on Optics".
This work successfully extended ORPAM from anesthetized, head-restrained mice to awake, freely moving mice for the first time. The new microscope probe weighs just 1.8 grams and applied a detachable structure. The probe can capture cerebral vascular network and hemodynamics of large portions of the cerebral cortex with capillary-level resolution without requiring any labels. Jürgen Sawinski summarized this work with "Itpromises to be a valuable tool for long-term hemodynamic studies over days andpossibly weeks, and supplement the wide range of brain activity related detection tools".
The work in this paper is our first step. In the future, we will develop a probe with better performance such as capillary-level resolution, video-rate imaging speed and a large field of view to cover the entire cerebral cortex. We want to push the performance of the probe so that even more can be learned about brain activity and how it might relate to disease and health.
