ADVANCED MORPHOLOGY ANALYSIS ON THE BIOCHEMICAL AND MECHANICAL EFFECT ON MICROFLUIDIC VESSEL NETWORK

Microfluidic vessel network is a promising tool in various area of study including modeling of vascularized organs and vascular diseases.[1] The common supporting cell for vessel network formation, fibroblasts, grow excessively in 3D environment and cause significant vessel morphology change, render the vessel network unstable for long term culture.[2] We propose to profile the vessel morphology of various culture set-ups, with the aim of replacing fibroblast with its conditioned media or a set of angiogenic factors and testing the effect of flow on vessel morphology.Current analyses on microfluidic vessel networks were mostly conducted at 1 to 3 far apart time points.[3] Since the day-to-day morphology change is significant and can affect result interpretation, we propose and report here in-depth morphology analysis comprising continuous temporal profiles to highlight dynamic remodeling and aid time point selection.Because the traditional branch-based image analysis tools [4] and metrics [5] failed to capture the wide range of morphology features presented in in vitro vessel network culture, we proposed new void-based metrics to capture and compare those morphological features.