<p>(A) Three explants were placed at a distance of approximately 2 mm from each other to form the vertices of a triangle. A tiled image consisting of 36 individual 10x DIC images was acquired every 15 minutes in order to observe and quantify structural and morphological changes in the fibrin gel. (B) Over the course of the experiment the instantaneous and cumulative displacements of a subset of embedded microspheres was analyzed at each location (the depicted image corresponds to the black box in (A)). (C) The image-based computational model consists of finite elements containing fiber networks that are representative of the fibrin fibers in the gel. (D) The model is partitioned into cellular networks (white elements) and surrounding fibrin networks (yellow elements) that are configured to approximate the geometric configuration of the explants and gel in the experiments.</p
