Abstract
Purpose :
Tissue damage in the center nervous system elicits a robust inflammatory response, which is partly mediated by infiltrating immune cells including macrophages. Macrophages, as professional phagocytes, initially play an important role in cellular debris clearance. Infiltrating macrophages can uptake lipid debris after spinal cord injury. We investigated if a similar mechanism exists in the optic nerve (ON).
Methods :
Col1α1-GFP mouse and C57BL/6 mice underwent optic nerve crush. These mice were sacrificed at different time points (7, 14, and 28 days) after ON injury. Optic nerves were stained for immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence analysis of macrophage and lipid markers.
Results :
Our results demonstrate infiltration of foamy macrophages in the ON after ON crush. Lipid droplets are stained with Oil Red O and engulfed by CD11b labeled foamy macrophages. The peak of Oil Red O staining occurs 14 days after ON crush injury. Those foamy macrophages do not co-localize with GFP-labeled Col1α1 fibroblasts.
Conclusions :
The experimental results demonstrate that our model can successfully adapt the prior knowledge learned from the axons and dendrites segmentation of RGC images to the segmentation of vascular structures in OCTA images.
This abstract was presented at the 2022 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Denver, CO, May 1-4, 2022, and virtually.