Analysis of ciliary beat frequency in the mouse oviduct using optical coherence tomography

Oviduct, along with the ciliary beat at a native frequency, plays a key role in gamete transport, fertilization and preimplantation embryo development in mammals. However, it remains largely unclear about the mechanism of reproductive medicine accompanied by the cilia activity. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the ciliary motion using our custom-designed spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) system with the central wavelength of 840 nm. Typically, OCT allows for mapping the cilia locations in mouse oviduct in vivo with the high-speed micro-scale resolution. Prior to the experiment, the OCT imaging was compared with the digital microscopic imaging, so as to validate our approaches and algorithms for measuring cilia in mouse trachea in vitro. The results demonstrated that, the OCT system not only rapidly determined the ciliary beat frequency (CBF) in the mouse oviduct in vivo, but also presented the mapping of CBF in the mouse oviduct. Furthermore, the ciliary motion was analyzed by selecting four areas of interest from the mapping of CBF location. The results suggested that, ciliary beat showed a similar frequency range within a local region in identical mouse oviduct fold. In conclusion, the approach proposed in this study benefits the in vivo study on mammalian reproduction, which contributes to exploring the link of infertility and ciliary activities.