Development of a real-time respiration monitoring system for in-vivo optical imaging

摘要

Anaesthesia induces autonomic nervous system depression that leads to cardiovascular and respiratory depression. The most reliable method to monitor the depth of anaesthesia in gas-anaesthetised small animals, is by monitoring the respiration rate. Ifthe rate is high the animal is too lightly anaesthetised and at-risk of waking up. If the rate is too low, basic physiology including blood oxygenation can be adversely affected and can lead to death. Commercial bioluminescence scanners provide an anaesthetic gas delivery system for use in mice but do not provide a means for monitoring the depth of anaesthesia. When starting the imaging session, the door of the dark chamber is closed. Opening the door is either not possible or will abort the imaging session. As such once the door is closed, no monitoring of the animal is achievable. This in turn means that the user is unable to confirm the depth of anaesthesia throughout the imaging procedure. Therefore animals are at risk of being under or over-anaesthetised. This is particularly important when performing kinetic assays, which can take more than lhr to complete. A simple retrofit to a commercial optical imaging scanner allowed real timerespiration monitoring throughout the imaging procedure.