Surgical treatment of vascular disease has become common. The use of synthe
tic materials is limited to grafts larger than 5-6 mm, because of the frequ
ency of occlusion observed with small-diameter prosthetics. An alternative
would be a hybrid or tissue-engineered graft with the surface coated with a
monolayer of the patients' own endothelial cells. This review examines the
various techniques and technologies used to date in order to extract endot
helial cells for such graft engineering.