Table 1.

Focal ischemic stroke models.

Model	Surgical procedures	Species/Ages	Major pathological change	Reference
Photothrombosis	intravascular photocoagulation and inducing occlusion of the irradiated vessels with secondary tissue ischemia	Rat/Adult	Localized focal injury that may depend on injection site. Massive T cell and macrophage infiltration, controlled lesion in cortical areas, fast blood-brain barrier disruption and vasogenic edema	(Rosenblum and El-Sabban, 1977); (Watson et al., 1985)
MCA Occlusion	thrombembolic MCAO: injecting clots that were formed in vitro or by endovascular instillation of thrombin for in situ clotting	Rat/Adult/Neonate Mouse/Adult Dogs/Adult Sheep/Adult Monkey/Adult	Severe stroke model can cause half hemisphere damage in suture MCAO; Vascular endothelial damage, platelet activation and subsequent thrombotic vessel occlusion	(Tamura et al., 1981a); (Nagasawa and Kogure, 1989); (Chen et al., 1986); (Boltze et al., 2008); (Fan et al., 2012)
Endothelin Stroke	cortical application of ET-1	Rat/Adult	Necrotic, apoptotic and hypertrophic neurons and neurons with pyknosis in surrounding penumbra	(Robinson et al., 1990); Masaki et al (1992); Macrae et al. (1993); (Sharkey et al., 1993); Fuxe et al. (1997)
Barrel Cortex Stroke	permanently ligating 3 to 6 branches of MCA, temporarily occluding CCA	Mouse/6–8 wk; Rat/Adult/Neonate	First ischemic model specifically targeting the barrel cortex and suitable for whisker functional studies; Infarct formation in rodent somatosensory barrel cortex, vascular endothelial damage, and platelet activation	(Wei et al., 1995); (Luo et al., 2008); (Jiang et al., 2016)

Abbreviation in the Table: BBB, blood-brain barrier; BMSC, bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell; CCA, common carotid artery; ES, embryonic stem cells; ET-1, endothelin-1; iPS, induced pluripotent stem cells; LCBF, local cerebral blood flow; MCA, middle cerebral artery; NSC, neural stem cells; PN, postnatal.