ABSTRACT
Cardiovascular diseases are considered among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Although the vast majority of vascular pathologies, including atherosclerosis, involve the vascular wall, in clinical practice current standard clinical imaging methods are mainly limited to the evaluation of luminal stenosis, which presents numerous limitations in the evaluation of vessel wall and in the in vivo characterization of arterial pathologies such as atherosclerotic plaque and inflammation. The arterial wall of small animals such as rats and mice consists of three tunics: the tunica intima, the tunica media, and the tunica adventitia. Although the main anatomic and histologic structure of the vasculature in humans and mice are similar, differences such as thinner walls in mouse arteries and the prominent presence of cardiomyocytes around the pulmonary veins of mice have been noticed. Real-time confocal wide-field microscopy imaging was recently employed to visualize thrombus formation in the microcirculation of an in vivo mouse model of laser-induced vascular injury.
