MicroBundleCompute

MicroBundleCompute automates the segmentation, tracking, and analysis of subdomain deformation in cardiac microbundles to quantify morphology-based mechanical metrics from time-lapse movies.

Key Features:

• Automated Tissue Segmentation: Performs automatic tissue segmentation on brightfield and phase contrast movies of beating cardiac microbundles.
• Cell Tracking: Tracks tissue motion across time-lapse image sequences without user intervention.
• Subdomain Deformation Analysis: Computes full-field tissue displacements and strains rather than limited metrics such as post forces or average tissue stress.
• Minimal Parameter Requirements: Requires minimal input parameter setting selection for operation.
• Computational Efficiency: Operates with low computational cost for processing contraction movies.

Scientific Applications:

• hiPSC-CM Maturity Assessment: Enables quantitative comparison of functional behavior across different physical platforms and cell culture protocols promoting human induced pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocyte maturity.
• Disease Modeling: Supports functional analysis of cardiac microbundles for cardiovascular disease modeling applications.
• Drug Discovery: Provides reproducible functional metrics suitable for evaluating drug effects on cardiac tissue contractility.
• Regenerative Tissue Engineering: Facilitates characterization of engineered cardiac tissues for regenerative medicine applications.
• Heterogeneous Deformation Mapping: Allows exploration of spatially varying tissue deformations and strains as functional metrics for cardiac microbundle characterization.

Methodology:

The computational framework processes brightfield and phase contrast movies of beating cardiac microbundles through automatic tissue segmentation, tracking, and analysis to extract morphology-based mechanical metrics including full-field displacements and strains.