Tissue Engineering is a relatively new area of endeavor, involving cell biology and materials science. It involves the the development of biological materials that can repair, maintain, or enhance tissue function.

Tissue engineering is an emerging, interdisciplinary field which is full of promise for those in need of organ and tissue replacement and repair. To date, the commercial success of tissue engineered products has been largely unfulfilled.

The development of tissue engineered products is limited by the lack of laboratory imaging techniques which are capable of non-destructive imaging of the three-dimensional morphology as well as the cell response of a tissue engineering scaffold. In this project, a collinear optical coherence/confocal fluorescence microscope capable of high-resolution imaging of porous scaffolds has been developed. The combined data is then visualized in our interactive, immersive visualization environment in order to gain new insights into characteristics that promote cell growth and propagation. The ability to evaluate cell scaffold viability in this way will enable the developers of tissue engineered materials to minimize expensive and time-consuming animal studies.

The immersive visualization used by the scientists is based on open source software, DIVERSE and openDX, as well as additional software created in-house. The creation of the visualizations requires several steps:

	registration of the data from the various sources into a common 3D coordinate system,
	segmentation of the data into scaffold material, cell, and pore space,
	generation of 3D polygonal surfaces corresponding to the surfaces of cells and scaffold, and
	creation of an interactive immersive display of data.