Mechanisms of artificial cartilage generation in polyglycolic acid scaffold revealed by multiphoton microscopy

Multiphoton microscopy is a nonlinear excitation imaging technique useful in probing structural and dynamic phenomena in biological systems. In this work, the advantages of multiphoton microscopy is explored to follow the physiological changes to tissue engineered cartilage using human mesenchymal bone marrow stem cells cultured in polyglycolic acid (PGA) scaffold. Multiphoton induced intrinsic luminescence signals from these specimens reveal the generation of extracellular matrix distorts the PGA scaffolds and show that multiphoton microscopy can be a useful technique in assessing the physiological states of tissue engineered constructs.