In 1869, Paul Langerhans as a medical student first described the islet cells from rabbit pancreas as “small irregularly polygonal structures” that “gathered in rounded masses, 0.12-0.24 mm in diameter, distributed at regular intervals in the parenchyma”. Complementarily, for structural analysis of blood vessels, the recent technical advancements of confocal microscopy and tissue clearing have enabled us to image the three-dimensional network structure in thick tissue slices.
For in vivo small animal studies, intravital microscopy based on two-photon excitation microscopes is a powerful tool that enables capturing the flow direction and speed of individual fluorescent-labeled red blood cells. In this mini-review, practical applications of in vivo and in situ studies of islet microcirculation are described with a specific emphasis on large-scale data analysis to ensure sufficient sample size accounting for known islet heterogeneity. This recent model may provide revived or contrasting hypotheses to test, since the pancreatic microcirculation has critical implications for the regulation of islet hormones as well as acinar pancreas functions. A new model proposes that pancreatic islet blood flow is integrated with the surrounding exocrine capillary network.
Islet microcirculation has long been considered to be regulated independently from that of the exocrine pancreas. While treatment of a disease with either an endocrine or exocrine pathogenesis may affect the function of the entire pancreas, the pancreatic diseases have been treated by clinicians in different medical disciplines, including endocrinologists and gastroenterologists. The pancreas is regarded as consisting of two separate organ systems, the endocrine and exocrine pancreas. Department of Medicine, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States.
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