Cerebral edema is a severe complication of acute ischemic stroke with high mortality but limited treatment. Although parameters such as brain water content and intracranial pressure may represent the global assessment of edema, optical properties can appear heterogeneously throughout the cerebral tissue relative to the site of injury. In this study, we have monitored the edema formation and progression in both permanent and transient middle cerebral artery occlusion models in rats. Edema was reflected by the decrease of optical attenuation coefficient (OAC) value in OCT system. By utilizing swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT), we found that in photochemically induced permanent focal stroke model, both the edema size and edema index, steadily developed until the end of monitor (7 h). Comparatively, when transient ischemia was introduced with endothelin-1 (ET-1), the edema was detected as early as 15 min, and began to recover after 30 min until monitor was finished (3 h). Despite the majority of the edema being recovered to some extent, the condition of a small region within the edema kept deteriorating, presumably due to the reperfusion damage which might result in serious clinical outcomes. Our study has compared the edema characteristics from two different acute ischemic stroke situations. This work not only confirms the capability of OCT to temporal and spatial monitor of edema but is also able to locate focal conditions at some areas that might highly determine the prognosis and treatment decisions.