Label-free photoacoustic imaging of the cardio-cerebrovascular development in the embryonic zebrafish.

Zebrafish play an important role in biology, pharmacology, toxicology, and medicine. The cardio-cerebrovascular development of zebrafish is particularly critical to understand both brain disorders and cardiovascular diseases in human. In this paper, we applied optical resolution photoacoustic microscopy (ORPAM) to image the whole-body vasculature of the embryonic zebrafish with a special focus on the development of the cardio-cerebrovascular system. Using the intrinsic optical absorption contrast of the embryo, we successfully visualized the formation of the cardio-cerebrovascular network in high-resolution using a 10 × objective, and monitored the whole-body vascular development using a 4 × objective. In addition, we evaluated the impact of the eggshell and pigment inhibitor on the image quality. Our results suggest that ORPAM is capable of studying the cardio-cerebrovascular development of zebrafish in the embryonic stage, and thus has the potential to investigate the cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases of human in the future.