ABSTRACT
Tissue engineering (TE) and regenerative medicine has been generally regarded as one of the most promising approaches to eventually address the ever-pressing clinical problem of organ and tissue shortage with the global aging in this century. e multi-disciplinary research eorts in this eld mainly concentrate on generating functionally eective tissue-engineered (TE) constructs, which can be implanted, restore, and repair the damaged organ or tissue. e combinational use of three-dimensional (3D) scaffolds, stem cells, growth factors and culture conditioning to fabricate TE constructs has constituted the basic tenets in the eld of TE and regenerative medicine. To facilitate the translational research of TE and regenerative medicine, it is essentially important and desirable to develop examination techniques, which can quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the spatial development of cell performance and tissue regeneration in the TE constructs both in vitro before implantation and in vivo aer implantation.
