Abstract

This paper describes a novel optical method for label-free quantitative imaging of cerebral blood flow (CBF) and intracellular motility (IM) in the rodent cerebral cortex. This method is based on a technique that integrates dynamic light scattering (DLS) and optical coherence tomography (OCT), named DLS-OCT. The technique measures both the axial and transverse velocities of CBF, whereas conventional Doppler OCT measures only the axial one. In addition, the technique produces a three-dimensional map of the diffusion coefficient quantifying nontranslational motions. In the DLS-OCT diffusion map, we observed high-diffusion spots, whose locations highly correspond to neuronal cell bodies and whose diffusion coefficient agreed with that of the motion of intracellular organelles reported in vitro in the literature. Therefore, the present method has enabled, for the first time to our knowledge, label-free imaging of the diffusion-like motion of intracellular organelles in vivo. As an example application, we used the method to monitor CBF and IM during a brief ischemic stroke, where we observed an induced persistent reduction in IM despite the recovery of CBF after stroke. This result supports that the IM measured in this study represent the cellular energy metabolism-related active motion of intracellular organelles rather than free diffusion of intracellular macromolecules.