Manabu SATO^1* and Izumi NISHIDATE²

¹Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Yamagata University, Yonezawa, Yamagata 992-8510, Japan
²Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Koganei, Tokyo 184-8588, Japan

(Received October 9, 2013; Revised November 22, 2013; Accepted December 3, 2013)

We investigated the feasibility of OCT in monitoring the viability of the brain. It was confirmed that after an overdose of pentobarbital sodium salt for an euthanasia, the OCT signal intensity increased before cardiac arrest and finally became 2.7 times, and by periodically changing the tissue temperature from 20 to 32 ℃ in vivo, average correlation coefficients between the ratio of signal intensity (RSI) and temperature were determined to be -0.42 to -0.50. RSI reversibly changed with subsequent variations of temperatures and finally increased rapidly just before cardiac arrest. These results indicate that RSI could correspond to decreases in viability.

Key words: viability, brain, wide field, optical coherence tomography

^*E-mail address: msato@yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp