Figure 3. Optimization of stimulation amplitude.
Contractile activity of tissue-engineered cardiac constructs cultured either without stimulation (control) or with pulsatile stimulation (square-wave monophasic pulses, duration 2 ms) for 5 days with increasing amplitudes of stimulation. Pink shading indicates the range of applied electrical stimulation regimes identified as having produced enhanced performance with respect to the particular metric (i.e. excitation threshold, maximum capture rate, amplitude of contraction: see discussion for details) (A) Excitation threshold (electrical field that needs to be applied to induce synchronous contractions of cultured tissue constructs) (B) maximum capture rate (the maximum frequency at which tissue constructs can be induced to beat). (C) Amplitude of contraction. * significantly different from control group with one-way ANOVA test (p<0.05) n=5–10 each group from 2 separate experiments.