Optical coherence tomography reveals in vivo cortical plasticity of adult mice in response to peripheral neuropathic pain.

We examined neural plasticity in mice in vivo using optical coherence tomography (OCT) of primary somatosensory (S1) and motor (M1) cortices of mice under the influence of sciatic nerve chronic constriction injury (CCI), a model of neuropathic pain widely utilized in rats. The OCT system used in this study provided cross-sectional images of the cortical tissue of mice up to a depth of about 1mm with longitudinal resolution up to 11μm. This is the first study to evaluate neural plasticity in vivo using OCT.