Mouse Models of Retinal Hemorrhage 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 Hemorrhage

Retinal hemorrhage is a sign rather than a disease in its own right: blood that has escaped from a retinal or choroidal vessel into the retina or into the spaces beside it, and it is an endpoint shared by conditions that damage vessel walls or disturb the flow and pressure within them.

In people it is read as evidence about the vasculature that produced it, because where the blood settles follows from which vessels bled:

• Blood tracking along nerve fiber bundles in the superficial retina points to a different source from a round, deeper intraretinal collection
• Blood beneath the retina or beneath the retinal pigment epithelium implicates the choroidal side

Retinal Hemorrhage in Experimental Research

What an animal model of retinal hemorrhage supplies turns on how the blood came to be there:

• In an induced preparation the bleed is placed at a chosen time, site and mechanism, and that choice is what the preparation is for
• Where the bleeding follows from a mutation or emerges with age it is not placed, and what the preparation supplies instead is bleeding that arises of itself from a defined genotype or over a defined course

Neither description is the whole of it, and a preparation may sit outside both. Where one of them applies, it puts the bleeding in an animal whose retinal circulation can be imaged in the living eye and then examined in flat mount or section, so an appearance can be tied to its source, the course can be followed in the same eye as the blood persists or clears, and an intervention can be tested against the bleeding or against what the blood does while it is there.

Because it is a sign, a model of retinal hemorrhage is not by itself a model of a condition that produces one, and what any single model demonstrates is bounded by whatever made it bleed: by the mechanism applied, where the bleeding was induced, and by the genotype or the course of aging, where it arose from one of those.

A mouse retina has no macula, so what decides how much a human hemorrhage costs, whether it sits at the center of vision and what the person can then see, has no counterpart here, and severity is expressed instead in structural and functional terms.

Mouse Models of Retinal Hemorrhage

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 Hemorrhage in Mice

This page lists 15 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2013 to 2025, that study retinal hemorrhage in mice.

Of these publications:

• 14 studies used mice as the primary retinal hemorrhage 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 hemorrhage 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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. It is an induced injury, not the disease: it produces a lesion directly, bypassing the process that gives rise to comparable damage in patients.

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.

CRISPR-Based Ocular Gene Editing

Uses a programmable genome-editing system to alter DNA at an endogenous locus rather than adding a separate replacement copy. Depending on the editor and design, it can disrupt, correct or install a sequence, either therapeutically or to create an experimental model. Once a genomic sequence change is established, the edit itself cannot be withdrawn like a dose; where the edit is present from conception, the resulting phenotype also reflects its effects throughout development. Off-target sequence changes are a separate question that structural imaging does not 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.