Rat Models of Choroidal Neovascularization 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 Choroidal Neovascularization

Choroidal neovascularization is the growth of new vessels out of the choroidal circulation, through or across Bruch's membrane, into the plane beneath the retinal pigment epithelium or beneath the neurosensory retina. It is an endpoint that several distinct eye diseases arrive at rather than a diagnosis in its own right, and some lesions are idiopathic.

Features of a neovascular lesion include:

• Vessels that are often immature and permeable
• Exudative lesions that may produce subretinal or sub-RPE fluid, lipid or blood, and can organize over time into fibrovascular scar
• Non-exudative complexes, with flow detectable before or without clinically evident leakage or fluid

What makes it sight-threatening in people is where it sits, because a lesion at or near the macula takes central vision while an eccentric one may spare it.

Choroidal Neovascularization in Experimental Research

What an animal model of choroidal neovascularization supplies is that lesion in a living eye, open to repeated angiographic and cross-sectional imaging, to measurement of lesion area and, where present, leakage or exudation, and to a test of whether an intervention prevents, limits or reverses it.

Two limits apply to translation:

• Mouse, rat and rabbit retinas have no macula, so an animal model in these species reproduces the neovascular lesion and its response to treatment rather than the macular anatomy that gives the human lesion its consequence. Endpoints resting on that anatomy, such as distortion and loss of reading vision, lack a counterpart in these animals.
• In a person the vessels grow through Bruch's membrane and pigment epithelium already altered by whatever preceded them, so a preparation that begins at the neovascular event supplies the lesion without the condition that permitted it, and does not by itself establish which of the diseases ending in choroidal neovascularization is being modeled.

Rat Models of Choroidal Neovascularization

The rat offers a larger eye than the mouse while remaining a small-animal model, which eases injection and imaging without moving to a large species.

Published MICRON Research: Choroidal Neovascularization in Rats

This page lists 14 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2012 to 2026, that study choroidal neovascularization in rats.

Of these publications:

• 14 studies used rats as the primary choroidal neovascularization disease model.

In 13 of the 14 papers, choroidal neovascularization was induced in the rats by laser.

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 choroidal neovascularization 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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

Ocular Implants / Sustained Release

A sustained-release system holds a compound in or on the eye and lets it out gradually, so exposure is maintained from one placement rather than from a series of doses. The class spans polymer and non-polymer solid depots, injectable and particulate carriers, and reservoir devices; the release period belongs to the platform and not to the route, and runs from days to years. What the approach is for is to separate the dosing interval from the procedure interval, holding exposure at the target for as long as the question runs, whether that is the few weeks of a short-lived model or the span of a lifelong disease, without an intervention for each dose. What it gives up is control after placement. The release profile has to be measured rather than assumed, altering or ending delivery may require a further procedure, biodegradable systems behave differently from removable ones, and the carrier sits in contact with ocular tissue, so how the eye tolerates it is part of the result and not a precondition of it.

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

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