Animal models of stroke are used extensively to study the mechanisms involved in the acute and chronic phases of recovery following stroke. A translatable animal model that closely mimics the mechanisms of a human stroke is essential in understanding recovery processes as well as developing therapies that improve functional outcomes. We describe a photothrombosis stroke model that is capable of targeting a single distal pial branch of the middle cerebral artery with minimal damage to the surrounding parenchyma in awake head-fixed mice. Mice are implanted with chronic cranial windows above one hemisphere of the brain that allow optical access to study recovery mechanisms for over a month following occlusion. Additionally, we study the effect of laser spot size used for occlusion and demonstrate that a spot size with small axial and lateral resolution has the advantage of minimizing unwanted photodamage while still monitoring macroscopic changes to cerebral blood flow during photothrombosis. We show that temporally guiding illumination using real-time feedback of blood flow dynamics also minimized unwanted photodamage to the vascular network. Finally, through quantifiable behavior deficits and chronic imaging we show that this model can be used to study recovery mechanisms or the effects of therapeutics longitudinally.

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is widely used in biomedical optics with applications ranging from basic science, such as in functional neuroimaging, to clinical, as in pulse oximetry. Despite the relatively low absorption of tissue in the near-infrared, there is still a significant amount of optical attenuation produced by the highly scattering nature of tissue. Because of this, designers of NIRS systems have to balance source optical power and source–detector separation to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). However, theoretical estimations of SNR neglect the effects of speckle. Speckle manifests as fluctuations of the optical power received at the detector. These fluctuations are caused by interference of the multiple random paths taken by photons in tissue. We present a model for the NIRS SNR that includes the effects of speckle. We performed experimental validations with a NIRS system to show that it agrees with our model. Additionally, we performed computer simulations based on the model to estimate the contribution of speckle noise for different collection areas and source–detector separations. We show that at short source–detector separation, speckle contributes most of the noise when using long coherence length sources. Considering this additional noise is especially important for hybrid applications that use NIRS and speckle contrast simultaneously, such as in diffuse correlation spectroscopy.