Mouse Models of Retinal Artery Occlusion in the MICRON Literature

About the MICRON Research Literature

These research pages organize published studies using MICRON imaging systems by animal species and the disease or condition investigated.

All publication counts and figures reflect the complete indexed research collection.

Explore related studies through the MICRON Research Hubs or search the complete publication collection in the reSEARCH portal.

Understanding Retinal Artery Occlusion

Retinal artery occlusion is an acute obstruction of the retinal arterial supply, at the central retinal artery or at one of its branches.

The tissue at risk is the inner retina, which that circulation feeds. The outer retina is supplied from the choroid and is not directly deprived, so the injury falls on the ganglion cell and inner nuclear layers while the photoreceptor layer is comparatively spared.

In people the presentation is sudden, painless loss of vision in one eye. Because the inner retina tolerates complete ischemia for hours rather than days it is handled as an emergency, and the event is investigated for an embolic, atherosclerotic or arteritic source outside the eye.

Retinal Artery Occlusion in Experimental Research

What an animal model can supply is that ischemic event placed in time:

• An onset that is set or observed rather than inferred from when a patient noticed a change
• A duration and a reperfusion that can be controlled where the occlusion is imposed
• The affected retina available for repeated imaging, functional measurement and histology at chosen times afterwards

What is harder to supply is the vascular substrate that produced the occlusion in a person: a vessel obstructed in the laboratory is obstructed by design, and a model built on a thrombotic predisposition carries that predisposition rather than the carotid, cardiac or arteritic sources a clinical investigation looks for.

The cherry-red spot, and the central sparing seen where a cilioretinal artery is present, are macular signs, and a mouse retina has no macula, so this work reports the ischemic injury and its response to treatment rather than that part of the human picture.

Mouse Models of Retinal Artery Occlusion

The mouse carries most of this work.

Transgenic and knockout lines allow a pathway to be removed or overexpressed, and cost, availability, short generation time and a large body of background data reinforce the choice.

A genetic manipulation constrains rather than isolates a mechanism: developmental compensation and pleiotropy remain possible.

Published MICRON Research: Retinal Artery Occlusion in Mice

This page lists 3 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2017 to 2024, that study retinal artery occlusion in mice.

Of these publications:

• 2 studies used mice as the primary retinal artery occlusion disease model.
• 1 study used healthy animals to assess pharmacokinetics, drug delivery, or tolerability.

Scope of the literature collection: Publication counts reflect studies identified and indexed in the MICRON research corpus. This collection is not intended to represent an exhaustive review of all published retinal artery occlusion research.

Which imaging and experimental techniques are used in these studies?

Technique counts are paper-level co-occurrences and do not necessarily indicate that a technique was applied to the focal species or focal disease model.

Capabilities and Limitations of Imaging Techniques

A summary of what each imaging technique listed above can measure, the information it provides, and its limitations in research applications.

Optical Coherence Tomography

Optical coherence tomography provides high-resolution, cross-sectional images of ocular tissues in the living eye, allowing researchers to visualize structures at different depths. OCT is particularly useful for measuring tissue thickness, identifying structural abnormalities, and assessing the location and extent of tissue changes.

As a non-invasive imaging technique, OCT enables repeated measurements in the same eye over time, supporting longitudinal studies of disease progression and treatment response. Although OCT provides detailed structural information, it does not directly measure cellular activity or visual function. Tissue that appears structurally normal may still have functional abnormalities, making OCT a valuable companion to functional assessments such as electroretinography (ERG).

Electroretinography

Records the retina's electrical response to light, giving component-sensitive information about outer- and inner-retinal function. It measures function directly, which no structural method does. Full-field ERG sums across the whole retina, so a small lesion can leave the trace unchanged; focal and multifocal variants trade signal amplitude for spatial resolution.

Intravitreal Injection / Delivery

Injection into the vitreous places a substance directly into the vitreous at a known administered dose and chosen time, reducing but not eliminating systemic exposure. The injectate may be a therapeutic compound, cell preparation or viral vector, or an agent used to create the model, such as a toxin, vasoactive or excitotoxic compound, or infectious inoculum. The route bypasses surface-delivery barriers and provides direct access to the vitreous and posterior segment, but the concentration reached in a particular ocular tissue depends on distribution and clearance and is not fixed by the injected dose alone. It is invasive and discrete: each repeat dose or challenge requires another injection, and vehicle- or sham-injected controls can help separate effects of the injectate from effects of the procedure.

Fundus Fluorescein Angiography

Fundus fluorescein angiography uses an injected fluorescent dye to visualize blood flow through the retinal and choroidal circulation. Sequential images show how vessels fill, identify areas of reduced or absent perfusion, and reveal dye leakage associated with vascular abnormalities.

This technique is particularly useful for evaluating vascular perfusion, blood-retinal barrier integrity, and abnormal vessel growth. Fluorescein angiography primarily shows dye distribution rather than the surrounding retinal tissue. It provides a two-dimensional (en face) view in which vessels at different depths may overlap. Cross-sectional and cellular structural details require other imaging methods, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) or optical coherence tomography angiography (OCT-A). Vascular abnormalities that do not affect dye filling or produce leakage may also remain undetected.

Laser Photocoagulation Models

A laser lesion provokes a reproducible, quantifiable injury at a known time and place. Wavelength, power, duration, spot size, pulse mode, focus and lesion location together determine the injury produced, allowing laser exposure to be configured for different experimental endpoints. In retinal vascular occlusion work the laser is a means of occluding a chosen retinal vessel, by photothrombosis after a photosensitiser has been given systemically or by direct photocoagulation of the vessel. The occlusion is the placed event, and much of the subsequent edema, ischemia, inner-retinal cell loss and inflammatory response arises downstream from impaired perfusion rather than from direct destruction of the whole affected retinal territory, although the laser can cause focal collateral injury at the target vessel. What such a preparation does not necessarily supply is the clinical antecedent that produced the occlusion: for example chronic local or systemic vascular disease, an arteriovenous-crossing lesion in branch vein occlusion, or an embolic or arteritic source in arterial occlusion. It therefore models the vascular obstruction and its retinal consequences more directly than it models the disease process that caused the obstruction in a patient.

Topical Ophthalmic Drug Delivery

A compound applied as drops to the ocular surface. It is non-invasive and repeatable, so it supports frequent dosing without a procedure for each dose. What the route has to establish depends on the target: for an ocular-surface target, residence time and penetration into the surface tissue are the main barriers; for an intraocular anterior-segment target, the compound must cross ocular-surface and corneal or conjunctival barriers and reach an intraocular concentration sufficient for the experiment; for a posterior-segment target, additional ocular barriers separate the surface from the target and posterior-segment exposure is harder to establish.

Which MICRON systems and add-ons appear?

Which strains and genetic lines are used?

Which other species appear alongside?

What other conditions are recorded on the same papers?

Which MICRON configurations appear in this work?

Configurations recorded in these papers, and the techniques recorded alongside them.

The papers

Browse all hubs at MICRON Research Hubs. The full corpus is searchable in the reSEARCH portal.