Cell Reports: Methods (Aug 2021)
Dense optical flow software to quantify cellular contractility
Abstract
Summary: Cell membrane deformation is an important feature that occurs during many physiological processes, and its study has been put to good use to investigate cardiomyocyte function. Several methods have been developed to extract information on cardiomyocyte contractility. However, no existing computational framework has provided, in a single platform, a straightforward approach to acquire, process, and quantify this type of cellular dynamics. For this reason, we develop CONTRACTIONWAVE, high-performance software written in Python programming language that allows the user to process large data image files and obtain contractility parameters by analyzing optical flow from images obtained with videomicroscopy. The software was validated by using neonatal, adult-, and human-induced pluripotent stem-cell-derived cardiomyocytes, treated or not with drugs known to affect contractility. Results presented indicate that CONTRACTIONWAVE is an excellent tool for examining changes to cardiac cellular contractility in animal models of disease and for pharmacological and toxicology screening during drug discovery. Motivation: Quantification of cardiomyocyte contractility is an important step in understanding the cellular mechanisms involved in the pathogenesis of cardiac disease. However, accurate and reproducible measurements are hampered by several factors inherent to the software options currently available. These include limited ability to process large datasets, the inability to provide calibrated measurements of contractility speed, the absence of a unified and accessible computational package, the high cost of some programs, and often the need for advanced programming skills. Aiming to overcome these limitations, we developed CONTRACTIONWAVE, open-source Python software that provides high-performance algorithms for large-scale analysis of cardiac contraction.
