Regenerative medicine involves formation of tissue or organ for replacement of a wounded or dysfunctional tissue. Healthy cells extracted from the patient are expanded and are seeded on a three-dimensional biodegradable scaffold. The structure is then placed in a bioreactor and is provided with nutrients for the cells, which proliferate and migrate throughout the scaffold to eventually form a desired to tissue that can be transplanted into the patient's body.  Inability to monitor this complex process of regeneration in real-time makes control and optimization of this process extremely difficult. Histology, the gold standard used for tissue structural assessment, is a static technique that only provides "snapshots" of the progress and requires the specimen to be sacrificed. This inefficiency severely limits our understanding of the biological processes associated with tissue growth during the in vitro pre-conditioning phase. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) enables imaging of cross sectional structure in biological tissues by measuring the echo time delay of backreflected light. OCT has recently emerged as an important method to assess the structures of physiological, pathological as well as tissue engineered blood vessels.

The goal of the present study is to develop an imaging system for non-destructive monitoring of blood vessels maturing within a bioreactor. Non-destructive structural imaging of tissue-engineered blood vessels cultured in a novel bioreactor was performed using free-space and catheter-based OCT imaging, while monitoring of the endothelium development was performed using a fluorescence imaging system that utilizes a commercial OCT catheter. The project included execution of three specific aims.

Firstly, we developed OCT instrumentation to determine geometrical and optical properties of porcine and human skin in real-time. The purpose of the second aim was to assess structural development of tissue-engineered blood vessels maturing in a bioreactor. We constructed a novel quartz-based bioreactor that will permit free space and catheter-based OCT imaging of vascular grafts. The grafts were made of biodegradable PCL-collagen and seeded with multipotent mesenchymal cells. We imaged the maturing grafts over 30 days to assess changes in graft wall thickness. We also monitored change in optical properties of the grafts based on free-space OCT scanning.

Finally, in order to visualize the proliferation of endothelial cells and development of the endothelium, we developed an imaging system that utilizes a commercial OCT catheter for single-cell-level imaging of the growing endothelium of a tissue-engineered blood vessel.

We have developed two modules of an imaging system for non-destructive monitoring of maturing bioengineered vascular grafts. The first module provides the ability to non-destructively examine the structure of the grafts while the second module can track the progress of endothelialization. As both modules use the same endoscope for imaging, when operated in sequence, they will produce high-resolution, three-dimensional, structural details of the graft and two-dimensional spatial distribution of ECs on the lumen. This non-destructive, multi-modality imaging can be potentially used to monitor and assess the development of luminal bioengineered constructs such as colon or trachea.