The Normal Behavior of the Pulmonary Blood Vessels With Observations on the Intermittence of the Flow of Blood in the Arterioles and Capillaries

Intravital microscopy of the lung: minimizing invasiveness

“…In particular, thoracotomy and the resulting pneumothorax prevent any long-term imaging, which would be of the highest interest to follow the dynamics of an event for days or weeks. To this end, keeping the pleura of small animals intact (as previously done on cats [21]) is worth considering, but still requires an important refinement of the surgical procedure.…”

“…The distal region of animal lungs having undergone a thoracotomy was illuminated through the diaphragm. This technique led in particular to a more extensive study of the pulmonary blood flow [21,22].…”

“…However, physiological motion of the chest from breathing and a beating heart greatly impairs image acquisition and thus prevents the extensive quantitative analysis of dynamic phenomena observed in the [30] 1925 Lung clamping Light microscopy Cat, rabbit [22] 1930 Manual tracking of lung movements using a mobile microscope Light microscopy Dog, frog, alligator [31] 1933 Lung clamping Light microscopy Rabbit, cat, dog [21] 1934 Curare Light microscopy Cat [48] 1969 Suction Light microscopy Dog [23] 1993 Implanted thoracic window Videomicroscopy Rabbit [58] 1998 Implanted thoracic window Videomicroscopy Rabbit [37] 1999 Apnea Confocal Rat [36] 1999 Apnea Confocal Rat [24] 2000 Suction Videomicroscopy Rat [50] 2000 Suction Confocal Mouse [38] 2001 Apnea Videomicroscopy Rat [45] 2004 Suction Videomicroscopy Mouse [25] 2008 Apnea Videomicroscopy Mouse [26] 2009 Slow breathing; apnea; implanted thoracic window lungs of living animals. For this reason, and for several centuries, the investigation of dynamic phenomena at a microscopic scale in the lungs of a living animal has been uniquely based on the subjective interpretation of the experimenter's observation.…”

“…In order to protect the lungs from the outside environment, and to avoid collapse as well as stabilization, several groups fix a rigid transparent chest window on big mammals like cats [21,59], rabbits [23,58], rats [24,60,61], and less frequently mice [45]. A variant consists in the use of a soft window, generally a polymer membrane, sealed over the thoracotomy [25,26,56].…”

“…It is worth keeping the pleura intact, as has been done back to 1934 [21], which could allow keeping the animal alive after the experiment. In this particular study, cats were chosen precisely because their pleura proved to be best suited to the method, especially compared to dogs or rabbits.…”