Ex Vivo Perfusion Culture of Large Blood Vessels in a 3D Printed Bioreactor.

Vascular disease forms the basis of most cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), which remain the primary cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. Efficacious surgical and pharmacological interventions to prevent and treat vascular disease are urgently needed. In part, the shortage of translational models limits the understanding of the cellular and molecular processes involved in vascular disease.

Porcine Organotypic Epicardial Slice Protocol: A Tool for the Study of Epicardium in Cardiovascular Research.

The epicardium has recently gained interest in the cardiovascular field due to its capacity to support heart regeneration after ischemic injury. Models to study the epicardium of large animals are limited and mainly based on epicardial cell isolation/differentiation from stem cells, followed by 2D cells culture. In this method paper, we describe the procedure to obtain and culture 3D organotypic heart slices presenting an intact epicardium, as a novel model to study the epicardial physiology and activation.

3D Printed Bioreactor Enabling the Pulsatile Culture of Native and Angioplastied Large Arteries.

Routine interventions such as balloon angioplasty, result in vascular activation and remodeling, often requiring re-intervention. models and small animal experiments have enabled the discovery of important mechanisms involved in this process, however the clinical translation is often underwhelming. There is a critical need for an model representative of the human vascular physiology and encompassing the complexity of the vascular wall and the physical forces regulating its function.

Pericytes' Circadian Clock Affects Endothelial Cells' Synchronization and Angiogenesis in a 3D Tissue Engineered Scaffold.

Angiogenesis, the formation of new capillaries from existing ones, is a fundamental process in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. While it is known to be affected by circadian rhythms , its peripheral regulation within the vasculature and the role it performs in regulating the interplay between vascular cells have not yet been investigated. Peripheral clocks within the vasculature have been described in the endothelium and in smooth muscle cells.

OCTAVA: An open-source toolbox for quantitative analysis of optical coherence tomography angiography images.

Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) performs non-invasive visualization and characterization of microvasculature in research and clinical applications mainly in ophthalmology and dermatology. A wide variety of instruments, imaging protocols, processing methods and metrics have been used to describe the microvasculature, such that comparing different study outcomes is currently not feasible. With the goal of contributing to standardization of OCTA data analysis, we report a user-friendly, open-source toolbox, OCTAVA (OCTA Vascular Analyzer), to automate the pre-processing, segmentation, and quantitative analysis of en face OCTA maximum intensity projection images in a standardized workflow.