Figure 8
From: Transformation of Breast Reconstruction via Additive Biomanufacturing
Representative images of Masson’s Trichrome stained tissue sections.
Green indicates collagen fibres, red indicates muscle-fibres and dark brown shows cell nuclei. (a,d) show empty scaffold group (b,e) show prevascularisation + lipoaspirate group (c,f) shows lipoaspirate-only group. Besides the adipose tissue, a majority of the tissue filling the pores of the implant consisted of connective and smooth muscle tissue. The smooth muscle layers had the highest thickness in case of the prevascularisation + lipoaspirate group. (g) Graph showing the adipose tissue area relative to total tissue area (AA/TA) over 24 weeks. Negative control scaffold-only group had the lowest AA/TA (8.31% ± 8.94) which was significantly lower than lipoaspirate-only (39.67% ± 2.04), prevascularisation + lipoaspirate group (47.32% ± 4.12) and native breast tissue (44.97% ± 14.12) (p < 0.05, p < 0.01 and p < 0.01 respectively). No significant difference in AA/TA was observed between the other groups. (h) Graph showing blood vessel density in the tissue sections. Highest blood vessel density was observed in the prevascularisation + lipoaspirate group (38.01/mm2 ± 2.02). However the density was not significantly higher than the scaffold-only (33.13/mm2 ± 12.03), lipoaspirate-only (26.67/mm2 ± 1.6) or control breast tissue (35.45/mm2 ± 1.93). (i) Histogram showing the distribution of adipose cells by cell surface-area. All histograms were skewed to the right suggesting that majority of cell surface areas lay in 100–700 μm2 range. The empty scaffold and lipoaspirate-only groups had a low number of adipose cells with surface areas larger than 800 μm2. The prevascularisation + lipoaspirate group showed a more equalised distribution with a significantly large number of cells having a surface area larger than 1000 μm2. (j) Graph showing tissue composition at week 24. TECs from empty scaffold group contained an estimated 4.99 cm3 ( ± 2.71) of adipose tissue, TECs from lipoaspirate-only group contained an estimated 23.85 cm3( ± 1.22) of adipose tissue, whereas TECs from prevascularisation + lipoaspirate group contained an estimated 28.391 cm3 ( ± 2.48) of adipose tissue. (k) Graph showing estimated fold increase in adipose volume compared to initial injected lipoaspirate volume (4 cm3). Prevascularisation + Lipoaspirate group had a higher fold increase in adipose volume (6.1 ± 0.62) compared to lipoaspirate-only group (4.95 ± 0.31); however, the difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.143).
