Big Toys

The dynamic retinal vessel analyser (dRVA) is used predominantly by Hala Shokr and allows us to correlate our ex-vivo small artery findings from our mouse or human experiments with in-vivo recordings. Arteries can be stimulated with flicker (‘endothelial vasodilation’) and more recently we are working on detection of the pulse wave character.

This set-up, funded by the British Heart Foundation, comprises an EM-CCD camera, Yokogawa spinning disc and Nikon Eclipse confocal microscope. It enables us to image intracellular calcium events at up to 50Hz. We have both the pressurised artery set-up for vascular smooth muscle (below left) and en-face pinned out chamber for endothelium (below right)