In vivo cortical optical imaging needs to overcome the scattering of skull. Compared to the traditional transcranial surgery-based open-skull glass window and thinned-skull preparation, chemical tissue optical clearing techniques can provide a skull-remained optical access to the brain while maintaining its original environment. However, previously demonstrated skull optical clearing windows could only maintain transparency for a couple of hours and hardly capable for high-resolution monitoring of awake animals. Here, we developed a convenient and easy-handling chronic skull optical clearing technique, named "Through-Intact-Skull (TIS) window", which was compatible with long-term observation at high resolution, and yielded large imaging depth of 900 m for cortical neurovascular visualization. In addition, our TIS window could monitor neuron activity in awake mice for a long term. Therefore, our bio-compatible and non-invasive TIS window is a new promising approach for intravital brain microscopy with great potential for basic research in neuroscience.

Download data

• Downloaded 654 times
• Download rankings, all-time:
  • Site-wide: 74,807
  • In neuroscience: 10,854
• Year to date:
  • Site-wide: 59,256
• Since beginning of last month:
  • Site-wide: 44,828

Altmetric data

Downloads over time

Distribution of downloads per paper, site-wide