Rat Models of Retinal 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 Retinal Neovascularization

Retinal neovascularization is new-vessel growth arising from the retinal circulation. In proliferative ischemic retinopathies such as diabetic retinopathy, retinal vein occlusion and retinopathy of prematurity, non-perfusion and tissue hypoxia are major drivers, with VEGF among the mediators linking ischemia to the vascular response.

Where the new vessels go varies and matters:

• They may cross the inner limiting membrane onto the retinal surface and into the vitreous
• Extend outward through the retina toward the subretinal space

Vessels that arise instead from the choroid, or from the limbal circulation into the cornea, arise from different vascular beds and in different anatomical and disease contexts, even though angiogenic mediators such as VEGF can be shared.

What threatens sight in people is largely what these vessels then do, leaking, bleeding into the vitreous, and drawing fibrovascular tissue that can contract and detach the retina. Leakage is imageable in the living eye, while new vessels that do not leak can be missed by that measurement.

Retinal Neovascularization in Experimental Research

Animal preparations make the vascular response available for repeated imaging and histology, together with its response to an intervention. In induced models the initiating exposure is placed at a known time; genetic models instead provide a reproducible genotype-dependent course whose onset and severity have to be characterized rather than assumed.

Whether a given preparation goes on to the fibrovascular and tractional stage is a property of that preparation and has to be established rather than inferred from the presence of new vessels.

The retinas differ in ways that bound what can be reproduced:

• Mouse, rat and macaque retinas are holangiotic, carrying retinal vessels across the retina as the human retina does
• The rabbit retina is merangiotic, its retinal vessels confined to the medullary rays with the remainder of the retina supplied from the choroid
• Macaques have a macula where mice, rats and rabbits do not

Rat Models of Retinal 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: Retinal Neovascularization in Rats

This page lists 6 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2013 to 2019, that study retinal neovascularization in rats.

Of these publications:

• 6 studies used rats as the primary retinal neovascularization disease model.

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

Retinal neovascularization is new-vessel growth arising from the retinal circulation. In proliferative ischemic retinopathies such as diabetic retinopathy, retinal vein occlusion and retinopathy of prematurity, non-perfusion and tissue hypoxia are major drivers, with VEGF among the mediators linking ischemia to the vascular response. Where the new vessels go varies and matters: they may cross the inner limiting membrane onto the retinal surface and into the vitreous, or extend outward through the retina toward the subretinal space, and vessels that arise instead from the choroid, or from the limbal circulation into the cornea, arise from different vascular beds and in different anatomical and disease contexts, even though angiogenic mediators such as VEGF can be shared. What threatens sight in people is largely what these vessels then do, leaking, bleeding into the vitreous, and drawing fibrovascular tissue that can contract and detach the retina; leakage is imageable in the living eye, while new vessels that do not leak can be missed by that measurement. Animal preparations make the vascular response available for repeated imaging and histology, together with its response to an intervention. In induced models the initiating exposure is placed at a known time; genetic models instead provide a reproducible genotype-dependent course whose onset and severity have to be characterized rather than assumed. Whether a given preparation goes on to the fibrovascular and tractional stage is a property of that preparation and has to be established rather than inferred from the presence of new vessels. The retinas differ in ways that bound what can be reproduced: mouse, rat and macaque retinas are holangiotic, carrying retinal vessels across the retina as the human retina does, whereas the rabbit retina is merangiotic, its retinal vessels confined to the medullary rays with the remainder of the retina supplied from the choroid; and macaques have a macula where mice, rats and rabbits do not.

Which MICRON configurations appear in this work?

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

The papers

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