Developing metrology for tissue engineering: collinear optical coherence and confocal fluorescence microscopies

We present a novel application of optical coherence microscopy (OCM) by combining it with confocal fluorescence microscopy (CFM) to gather simultaneous structural and functional information on tissue engineered medical products (TEMPs) in a registered fashion. In this work, we describe the collinear OCM and CFM instrument. We demonstrate the utility of this dual-mode technique for TEMPs by comparing the images of fluorescently stained osteoblasts cultured in a polymeric TEMP for 21 days and 10 weeks.