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Updated: Jul 11, 2025
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Published on: October 11, 2018
Vascular persistence following precision micropuncture
Summer N Horchler1, Patrick C Hancock1, Mingjie Sun1,2
1Irvin S. Zubar Plastic Surgery Research Laboratory, Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA.
Objective:
The success of engineered tissues continues to be limited by time to vascularization and perfusion. Recently, we described a simple microsurgical approach, termed micropuncture (MP), which could be used to rapidly vascularize an adjacently placed scaffold from the recipient macrovasculature. Here we studied the long-term persistence of the MP-induced microvasculature.
Methods:
Segmental 60 μm diameter MPs were created in the recipient rat femoral artery and vein followed by coverage with a simple Type 1 collagen scaffold. The recipient vasculature and scaffold were then wrapped en bloc with a silicone sheet to isolate intrinsic vascularization. Scaffolds were harvested at 28 days post-implantation for detailed analysis, including using a novel artificial intelligence (AI) approach.
Results:
MP scaffolds demonstrated a sustained increase of vascular density compared to internal non-MP control scaffolds (p < 0.05) secondary to increases in both vessel diameters (p < 0.05) and branch counts (p < 0.05). MP scaffolds also demonstrated statistically significant increases in red blood cell (RBC) perfused lumens.
Conclusions:
This study further highlights that the intrinsic MP-induced vasculature continues to persist long-term. Its combination of rapid and stable angiogenesis represents a novel surgical platform for engineered scaffold and graft perfusion.
