FIG. 2.

Endothelial vessels embedded in 2.5 and 6 mg/ml collagen gels within the microfluidic device. (a) Three-dimensional reconstruction from nuclei staining with DAPI, showing a longitudinal (upper) and a transverse (lower) view from a static and a flow vessel. (b) First row shows a gray scale example of the VE-cadherin staining of a vessel (maximum intensity projection), while second row shows, superimposed in cyan, the segmentation of the former performed by simple thresholding. (c) Phalloidin and VE-cadherin alignment index (alpha) of the maximum fluorescence projection of an endothelial vessel, with 1 being the complete alignment parallel to the vessel. (d) Diameters of each static and flow endothelial vessel. For all plots, each data point represents data from an individual device, and solid and dashed red lines represent the median and mean values, respectively. ANOVA tests were performed to determine statistical significance. *p < 0.05.