Viewing the microcirculation through the window: some twenty years experience with the hamster dorsal skinfold chamber

Intravital microscopy represents a sophisticated technique to study the microcirculation in health and disease. While most preparations used for those studies are acute in nature, the use of chamber preparations in the skinfold bear the advantage to allow for chronic studies with repeated analysis of the microcirculation over a prolonged period of time. The skinfold chamber model for microcirculatory analysis has been adapted to mice, rats and hamsters. Although the use of rats and, in particular, the use of mice has the advantage of the availability of species-specific tools, the use of the hamster as the experimental animal may be preferred due to anatomical reasons, which facilitate the microsurgical preparation and improve the quality of microscopic imaging. The use of the hamster dorsal skinfold chamber, firstly described by Endrich and coworkers in 1980, has brought out during the last two decades a considerable number of experimental studies within the fields of microcirculation physiology, inflammation and sepsis, ischemia-reperfusion, angiogenesis, and transplantation, indicating that the model has to be considered a versatile tool to study the microcirculation in health and disease.