Over the course of my Master's of Science at the University of Toronto (as part of a project first started around January 2020 and finally successfully defended in January 2023), I have been iterating through designs for the dorsal skinfold window chamber. I am proud to share this latest design with the world as a novel tool to improve longitudinal Biophotonics studies and facilitate the translation of the findings enabled through such studies by improving the accuracy and precision of inter-modality spatial co-registration (across significant resolution scales).

Here the 3D-printable peripheral toolset for the dorsal skinfold window chamber for robust longitudinal and multi-modal imaging experiments is presented. These represent the multitude of tools with which the DSWC may interface improving model longevity, and improving accuracy and precision of various procedures for reducing both experimental error (during data acquisition) and post-processing error (most notably the inter-modality and inter-timepoint spatial co-registration). The xy-microstage is presented in another one of my published thingiverse files. Design and fabrication will be fully described in "Low-Cost 3D-Printed Tools Towards Robust Longitudinal Multi-Modal Pre-Clinical Imaging" by Allam N et al (soon to be published, preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.07.570719v1). This is also all described in my thesis (which will be available through T-space in December 2023).

Here in particular the surgical stage, the surgical guide tool, the window chamber cover, the pre- and post-removal stencil tools (guiding histology - optical imaging spatial co-registration), and fiducial markers tool (guiding MRI - optical imaging spatial co-registration) are included.

Please refer to the appendices here for more details: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BFr-JMqRf81g2N40xJZtYeX6mUx8XRaL?usp=sharing.

Please note that all procedures involving mice are performed following most humane procedures, under anesthesia and analgesia as outlined in AUP 3256 approved by the ARC committee at the University Health Network.

This research was supervised by Prof. Alex Vitkin, BEng, MEng, PhD, M-CCPM, Fellow - Optica, SPIE and AIMBE (https://medbio.utoronto.ca/faculty/vi...) and Prof. Edward Taylor, MSc, PhD, M-CCPM (https://radonc.utoronto.ca/faculty/ed...) funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, grant number 202010PJT. Nader Allam, BSc, MSc (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nader-allam-bsc-msc) also received support from the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation, from the Terry Fox Foundation’s Strategic Training in Transdisciplinary Radiation Sciences for the 21st Century (STARS21) program, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and from the Ontario Graduate Scholarship programs.