Thrombus formation in a blood vessel-on-chip with visible-light optical coherence tomography

Thrombus formation is a physiological response to damage in a blood vessel. Monitoring thrombus formation is challenging, due to the limited imaging options available to analyze flowing blood. In this work, we use a visible-light optical coherence tomography (vis-OCT) system to monitor the dynamic process of the formation of thrombi in a microfluidic blood vessel-on-chip (VoC) device. Inside the VoC, thrombi form in a monolayered channel of endothelial cells perfused by human whole blood. We show that the correlation of the vis-OCT signal can be utilized as a marker for thrombus formation and can track and quantify its growth over time. We validate our results with fluorescence microscopic imaging of fibrin and platelets.