Mouse Models of Retinal Vein 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 Vein Occlusion

Retinal vein occlusion is an obstruction of venous outflow from the retina, usually understood as a thrombotic event arising in a vascular setting shaped by local anatomy and systemic risk factors.

The recognized contributors include:

• Age
• Hypertension
• Hyperlipidemia
• Diabetes
• Raised intraocular pressure
• Hyperviscous or thrombophilic states

Obstructed outflow raises pressure upstream of the blockage and produces intraretinal hemorrhage, retinal edema, capillary non-perfusion and, where non-perfusion is extensive, ischemia-driven new vessel growth.

Retinal Vein Occlusion in Experimental Research

Rodent work reaches that state by a different route: a widely used approach gives a photosensitizing dye intravenously and applies laser to a chosen retinal vein, placing an occlusion at a known vessel within minutes, and genetic and pharmacological routes to retinal thrombosis are also described. That laser preparation can be run in a young animal with no antecedent vascular disease.

What such a model supplies is an occlusion of known onset and location, so the sequence from obstruction through edema, inner retinal cell loss and inflammatory response can be followed from its beginning and an intervention timed against it.

What the laser preparation does not supply is the antecedent:

• Where the occlusion is placed in a vessel that was healthy beforehand, the aging, hypertensive or hyperviscous vasculature in which a human occlusion develops is absent by construction
• Such an occlusion can reperfuse within days, so a long-standing obstruction is harder to sustain than in patients

A model built instead on a genetic or metabolic predisposition to thrombosis carries an antecedent of its own, and what it carries is the predisposition engineered into it rather than the accumulated vascular and systemic disease of a patient. Vision loss in human retinal vein occlusion is driven largely by macular edema, and mouse and rat retinas have no macula, so swelling here is assessed as thickening of the affected retinal sector rather than as the macular endpoint that governs human acuity.

Mouse Models of Retinal Vein 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 Vein Occlusion in Mice

This page lists 20 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2014 to 2026, that study retinal vein occlusion in mice.

Of these publications:

• 19 studies used mice as the primary retinal vein 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 vein 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

AAV-Mediated Ocular Gene Delivery

An adeno-associated viral vector delivers genetic material to ocular cells, and a single administration can support long-lived transgene expression. That persistence is useful for gene augmentation and sustained therapeutic-protein expression; AAV can also deliver gene-silencing or genome-editing cargo, where long-lived expression of the editing machinery may be unnecessary or undesirable. Capsid and route of delivery jointly determine which cells are reached, so different delivery routes and vector designs give different distributions.

Optokinetic / Optomotor Response

Measures a reflexive head or eye movement tracking a moving pattern, giving a rapid, training-free behavioral estimate of spatial vision and contrast sensitivity in an animal that cannot report them. It is driven largely by reflex circuitry and reports on the visual pathway as a whole, so a deficit it detects still has to be localized by a structural or electrophysiological method, or separated from cortical processing by an operant task.

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.