Thinned-skulled Cranial Window Preparation (Mice).

Imaging structural plasticity or activity of neurons in the brain circuit will facilitate understanding the neural mechanisms underlying animal behavior. Here we describe a modified procedure, the polished and reinforced thinned-skull cranial window preparation, by which we can image dendrites and spines in mouse layer I cortex for weeks ( Zhang et al., 2016 ). By this method, we also imaged the glioma initiation in the mouse cortex for two weeks in previous work ( Zhang et al., 2012 ), which included the photographs and video for reference.