Mechanical signaling in vascular tissue can have major effects on remodeling outcomes and the viability of bypass grafts. When a vein is placed into an environment matching that of an artery, the vein begins to remodel to act like an artery. This change is dependent on mechanotransduction pathways that sense stress from the blood flow. To properly study these pathways, vessels need to be studied ex vivo to control the stress patterns vessels will experience within a patient. The mechanical properties of the vessel will then need to be analyzed at a cellular level to correlate the strain of the environment to the cell response. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is able to capture b-scans of the entire vessel wall to observe changes at different lateral and axial positions. Multiple b-scans can be captured as the vessel experiences a pressure waveform mimicking physiological pressures and digital image correlation (DIC) can be performed to quantify the mechanical response of the tissue at each spot in the b-scan. A custom-built optical coherence tomography system was used to record images of a porcine carotid artery undergoing pressure changes to observe movements inside the vessel wall. DIC was performed to correlate the strain of the tissue to the experienced stress as a means of testing the system. This imaging method will provide valuable mechanical information as a vein is remodeled in a perfusion bioreactor.
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