Monitoring the effect of magnetically aligned collagen scaffolds on tendon tissue engineering by PSOCT

As the repair of injured or degenerated tendon is often compromised by the shortage of suitable donor tissue, other procedures need to be developed. The application of a functional tissue engineered tendon could prove to be a promising alternative therapy. Due to their good biocompatibility, collagen hydrogel based scaffolds have been considered to be potentially suitable for engineering tendon tissue in vitro. One of the major limitations of collagen hydrogels for engineering tissues is the difficulty in controlling their architecture and collagen concentration which results in poor mechanical strength. This study aims to overcome these limitations by creating a highly biocompatible scaffold that is both mechanically robust and aligned. Collagen fibers were pre-aligned under a high magnetic field then concentrated using plastic compression. Primary tenocytes cultured from rats were seeded on the aligned scaffolds. Following a protocol in public domain, thick cultured collagen constructs were rolled up into a spiral after undergoing plastic compressed. Both a light microscopy and a polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography (PSOCT) with central beam at 1300 nm were used to monitor the birefringence in the constructs. Conventional light microscopy showed that the tenocytes aligned along the pre-organized collagen bundles in contrast to the random distributed observed on unaligned scaffolds. PSOCT only revealed weak birefringence from aligned but uncompressed constructs. However, PSOCT images showed contrast band structures in the spiral constructs which suggests that the birefringence signal depends on the density of aligned collagen fibers. The effect of aligned cells, neo-formed matrix and the plastic compression on the birefringence signals are discussed in this paper briefly.