Fig. 5

Hindlimb blood flow recovery. a Representative LASCA images show improved perfusion in vehicle-, BMCs-, MSCs- and S-MSCs- treated mice at days 0 after ligation, 3 and 28. Low or no blood perfusion was displayed as dark blue, whereas the highest perfusion was displayed as red. b Hindlimb blood flow recovery after femoral artery ligation and BMCs (n = 40), MSCs (n = 35), S-MSCs (n = 40), or vehicle (n = 20) injection. CT by BMCs transplantation (blue) was effective in comparison with vehicle (green) injection for blood flow recovery at day 28 but BMCs did not restore completely the blood flow. In contrast MSCs (red) provided complete recovery at day 20 whereas S-MSCs (violet) were effective to completely restore blood flow at day 14. c Hindlimb blood flow recovery after BMCs (approximately 6 mice per patient), MSCs (approximately 6 mice per patient) and S-MSCs (approximately 6 mice per patient) infusion. BMCs were obtained from 7 different CLI-patients (Table 1) and were considered as “gold standard” (*comparison of MSCs group versus BMCs group; ^#S-MSCs versus BMCs; ^¥S-MSCs versus MSCs; ^§BMCs versus vehicle; ^ΔMSCs versus vehicle; ^∞S-MSCs versus vehicle)