穿越大肿瘤、进入血管系统、在循环中存活、在远处站点中退出并恢复增殖是肿瘤细胞成功转移所必需的步骤。肿瘤细胞完成这些步骤的能力高度依赖于与肿瘤微环境（TME）中的基质细胞、细胞外基质和可溶性因子进行的互动的时机和顺序。因此，TME在决定肿瘤的整体转移表型方面起着重要作用。目前，TME的复杂性和因果关系动力学无法在体外重现或通过固定组织的研究推断，最好实时单细胞分辨率在体内研究。 Intravital imaging（IVI）提供了这些功能，近年来该领域发展迅速。在这里，我们回顾了乳腺动物癌症模型IVI的一些最新进展，并描述IVI如何被用于理解癌症的进展和转移，并开发新的治疗方式。我们介绍了一些新技术，这些技术允许访问各种组织和癌症类型，新型荧光报告物和生物传感器，允许命运映射和功能和表型状态的探究，并且介绍了将这些技术，报告物和生物传感器应用于癌症研究的临床应用。最后，我们提出了该领域内仍存在的一些挑战，以及如何解决这些挑战和未来的展望。 © 2022 Springer Nature Limited.

Navigation through the bulk tumour, entry into the blood vasculature, survival in the circulation, exit at distant sites and resumption of proliferation are all steps necessary for tumour cells to successfully metastasize. The ability of tumour cells to complete these steps is highly dependent on the timing and sequence of the interactions that these cells have with the tumour microenvironment (TME), including stromal cells, the extracellular matrix and soluble factors. The TME thus plays a major role in determining the overall metastatic phenotype of tumours. The complexity and cause-and-effect dynamics of the TME cannot currently be recapitulated in vitro or inferred from studies of fixed tissue, and are best studied in vivo, in real time and at single-cell resolution. Intravital imaging (IVI) offers these capabilities, and recent years have been a time of immense growth and innovation in the field. Here we review some of the recent advances in IVI of mammalian models of cancer and describe how IVI is being used to understand cancer progression and metastasis, and to develop novel treatments and therapies. We describe new techniques that allow access to a range of tissue and cancer types, novel fluorescent reporters and biosensors that allow fate mapping and the probing of functional and phenotypic states, and the clinical applications that have arisen from applying these techniques, reporters and biosensors to study cancer. We finish by presenting some of the challenges that remain in the field, how to address them and future perspectives.© 2022. Springer Nature Limited.