ROCHESTER, NY (WROC) — When you picture an ultrasound, you usually think of using it to capture images during pregnancy, but according to a team of researchers from the University of Rochester it can do much more, including helping to build and create new blood vessels in the body.  Ultrasounds use acoustic waves to help create the images you see on the screen during the procedure. Those same waves if tuned properly can take cells and arrange them in specific patterns. If you use the right type of cells the process can produce blood vessels in tissue, Dr. Diane Dalecki, one of the lead scientists on the project, the Kevin J. Parker Distinguished Professor in Biomedical Engineering and director of the Rochester Center for Biomedical Ultrasound, explains further.  “In this technique, we harness some of the acoustic fields in the sound field called acoustic radiation forces. We use these forces to spatially move cells in a tissue or material. Now we can design the acoustic fields by changing their transducers or the frequency or the amplitude to produce different spatial patterns of cells. What we've discovered is by using this acoustic patterning, if we pattern the acoustic pattern a particular type of cell called endothelial cells, which is the building block of blood vessels, we can, within a number of days, produce living microvessel networks,” Parker said. Those microvessels also known as capillaries are located all over the human body and are what deliver blood directly to the cells. They even can produce arteries, if the right combination of cells is present according to Dr. Denise Hocking, a professor of pharmacology and physiology and another lead scientist in the project.  “We've shown that cells understand their relationship to one another, so you can pattern more than one cell type at a time,” Hocking said. Hocking added, “So for blood vessels, they're typically on the outside. They're covered with smooth muscle cells. If we take and simply pattern together smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells, we can be smooth muscle cells now to move to the outside, and the inside to form a more complex blood vessel.” They’ve even explored this process in other cell types as well, including neurons. “I can tell you that we've done some work as others have with neural cells. You can imagine patterning neurons in a pattern that you can see. you hope to allow for new neural connections.” Part of their research also includes utilizing cells from other sources than just stem cells too, instead, they hope to be able to use cells taken directly from future patients.  “The downside of using stem cells is it requires harvesting those cells and then propagating those cells in culture for quite some time before then re-implanting them. What we would like to do is to harvest not only stem cells but endothelial cells and other cell types right from fat,” Hocking said.  As of now, they’ve mainly focused on experiments in vials in the lab, and in mice but they do plan on going further soon in part thanks to a new two million dollar grant from the National Institute of Health that will fund them for the next 4 years.  “So our goal in this next phase is to actually inject hydrogels and cells right at the site where the blood vessels are needed, do the acoustic patterning site specifically, and produce micro-mesyl networks right in the body,” Dalecki said.  Hocking added: “We've made a lot of progress. So we've done it in vitro. We have also done our first studies in vivo using a mouse model. So we're actually pretty confident that in the span of the grant, which will be four years, that we'll make significant strides.”