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The role of the mechanical environment in defining tissue function, development and growth has been shown to be fundamental. Assessment of the changes in stiffness of tissue matrices at multiple scales has relied mostly on invasive and often specialist equipment such as AFM or mechanical testing devices poorly suited to the cell culture workflow.In this paper, we have developed a unbiased passive optical coherence elastography method, exploiting ambient vibrations in the sample that enables real-time noninvasive quantitative profiling of cells and tissues. We demonstrate a robust method that decouples optical scattering and mechanical properties by actively compensating for scattering associated noise bias and reducing variance. The efficiency for the method to retrieve ground truth is validated in silico and in vitro, and exemplified for key applications such as time course mechanical profiling of bone and cartilage spheroids, tissue engineering cancer models, tissue repair models and single cell. Our method is readily implementable with any commercial optical coherence tomography system without any hardware modifications, and thus offers a breakthrough in on-line tissue mechanical assessment of spatial mechanical properties for organoids, soft tissues and tissue engineering.

Refereed/Peer-reviewed Measuring tumor cell invasiveness through 3D tissues, particularly at the single-cell level, can provide important mechanistic understanding and assist in identifying therapeutic targets of tumor invasion. However, current experimental approaches, including standard in vitro invasion assays, have limited physiological relevance and offer insufficient insight into the vast heterogeneity in tumor cell migration through tissues. To address these issues, here the concept of optical cellular micromotion is reported on, where digital holographic microscopy is used to map the optical nano- to submicrometer thickness fluctuations within single-cells. These fluctuations are driven by the dynamic movement of subcellular structures including the cytoskeleton and inherently associated with the biological processes involved in cell invasion within tissues. It is experimentally demonstrated that the optical cellular micromotion correlates with tumor cells motility and invasiveness both at the population and single-cell levels. In addition, the optical cellular micromotion significantly reduced upon treatment with migrastatic drugs that inhibit tumor cell invasion. These results demonstrate that micromotion measurements can rapidly and non-invasively determine the invasive behavior of single tumor cells within tissues, yielding a new and powerful tool to assess the efficacy of approaches targeting tumor cell invasiveness.

The role of the mechanical environment in defining tissue function, development and growth has been shown to be fundamental. Assessment of the changes in stiffness of tissue matrices at multiple scales has relied mostly on invasive and often specialist equipment such as AFM or mechanical testing devices poorly suited to the cell culture workflow.In this paper, we have developed a novel unbiased passive optical coherence elastography method, exploiting ambient vibrations in the sample that enables real-time noninvasive quantitative profiling of cells and tissues. We demonstrate a robust method that decouples optical scattering and mechanical properties by actively compensating for scattering associated noise bias and reducing variance. The efficiency for the method to retrieve ground truth is validated in silico and in vitro, and exemplified for key applications such as time course mechanical profiling of bone and cartilage spheroids, tissue engineering cancer models, tissue repair models and single cell. Our method is readily implementable with any commercial optical coherence tomography system without any hardware modifications, and thus offers a breakthrough in tissue mechanical assessment for novel on line assessment of spatial mechanical properties for organoids, soft tissues and tissue engineering.

As the field of tissue engineering continues to progress, there is a deep need for non-invasive, label-free imaging technologies that can monitor tissue growth and health within thick three-dimensional (3D) constructs. Amongst the many imaging modalities under investigation, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has emerged as a promising tool, enabling non-destructive in situ characterization of scaffolds and engineered tissues. However, the lack of optical contrast between cells and scaffold materials using this technique remains a challenge. In this communication, we show that mapping the optical phase fluctuations resulting from cellular viability and motility allows for the distinction of live cells from their surrounding scaffold environment. Motility imaging was performed via a common-path optical coherence phase microscope (OCPM), an OCT modality that has been shown to be sensitive to nanometer-level fluctuations. More specifically, we examined the development of human adipose-derived stem cells and/or murine pre-osteoblasts within two distinct scaffold systems, commercially available alginate sponges and custom-microfabricated poly(d, l-lactic-co-glycolic acid) fibrous scaffolds. Cellular motility is demonstrated as an endogenous source of contrast for OCPM, enabling real-time, label-free monitoring of 3D engineered tissue development.

To assess non-invasively and in real time the three- dimensional organization of cells within porous matrices by combining Fourier Domain Optical Coherence Tomography (FDOCT) and Impedance Spectroscopy (IS).Broadband interferences resulting from the recombination of in-depth light scattering events within the sample and light from a reference arm are measured as a modulation of the spectrum generated by a superluminescent laser diode (lambdao = 930nm, FWHM 90nm). Fourier transform allows in-depth localization of the scatterers, and the 3D microstructure of the sample is reconstructed by raster scanning. Simultaneously impedance spectroscopy is performed with a dielectric probe connected to an impedance analyzer to gather additional cellular information, and synchronized with FDOCT measurements.A combined IS-FDOCT system allowing an axial resolution of 5 micrometer in tissues and impedance measurements over the range 20MHz-1GHz has been developed. Alginate matrices have been characterized in terms of microstructure and impedance. Matrices seeded with adipose-derived stem cells have been monitored without the use of labeling agent.We have developed a multimodality system that will be instrumental to non-invasively monitor changes in total cell volume fraction and infer cell-specific dielectric properties in 3D structure.