Imaging brain and spinal cord tissue: the challenges

Imaging brain and spinal cord tissue brings a large number of important challenges. First, we often need functional information that can only be obtained in live animals, which requires the development of fast systems to avoid movement of the tissue during acquisition, various endogenous modalities to access the rich molecular information that is available. We also need long term imaging to follow animals over time which demands solutions for the highly scattering tissue (spinal and cranial windows). Second, to image the connectivity in the brain over large areas we require fast systems with high resolution to have a high throughput. I will therefore present various technologies (fast imaging, movement compensation endogenous contrast, molecular imaging, etc...) for live animal imaging as well as new technologies we are developing for high throughput 3D imaging at high resolution for brain connectomics.