Head-Fixation

Innovative rodent head-fixation made simple for you and minimally-intrusive for your mice

Head-fixation minus the headaches... Maximal stability with minimal intrusion upon the animal

The growing use of head-fixation in awake rodents has enabled a range of sophisticated electrophysiological and imaging-based investigation of neural circuits in vivo, that are intractable in freely-moving animals.

The (many) problem(s) with head-fixation systems:

1. Often fiddly to fix the animal and not readily customisable for new targets
2. Head-bars often intrude upon the animal's sensory fields with impact on visual and auditory systems
   
3. Lack of off-the-shelf systems forcing reliance on 'home-made' solutions which vary in quality and reliability
4. Often constrained access for multi-target or multi-modal approaches using imaging + electrophysiology

The solution:

The RODent Immobilisation-system for Neuroscience (RODIN) head-fixation system, for rats and mice, marries innovative design with medical grade metal-printing to create a skull conformal, highly stable, lightweight and customisable implant system which is better for your animals (and their behaviour) as well as being straightforward and quick to use each day.

Multi-modal, multi-target head-fixation implants for combined electrophysiology and imaging

The innovative design of the RODIN head-fixation implant is built around a skull-conformal, ultra-light yet strong core which sets the fixation surface above and behind the skull unlike other implants that tend to sit low on the skull. This not only frees up skull space and easy access for multi-target electrophysiology (both acute and chronically-implanted moveable probes) and / or an imaging objective lens, but also reduces the impact of the implant on the animal's sensory fields (visual and often auditory systems) which in turn facilitates 'better' behaviour.

Despite weighing typically <1g, the RODIN head-fixation implants can achieve mechanical stability of <3 microns during behaviour. We haven't just thought about your animals though.... it's also really straightforward to fix your animal using the RODIN quick-release dovetail mount, typically requiring 3-4 seconds to fix your animal so less stress for both you and you animal before you start gathering your data.

If you are considering multi-target approaches in head-fixed animals, check out the Multi-Probe Manipulator system which offers you stereotaxically-guided precision adjustment of our acute silicon neural probes in real-time during your experiment.