Modeling analysis of microenvironment of 3D cell mechanics based on machine vision

Abstract

Aiming at the problem of poor construction accuracy of the cellular three-dimensional (3D) mechanical microenvironment, this article studies the cellular 3D mechanical microenvironment based on machine vision. The gelatin methacrylate microgel column was prepared by NIH/3T3 mouse fibroblast and precursor solution of gelatin methacrylate microgel. The gelatin methacrylate microgel array with magnetic end was adopted. The external magnetic field was used to load microgel array and build 3D mechanics microenvironment model. The deformed pictures of hydrogel under magnetic field were obtained by fluorescence microscope. The scanning electron microscope was used to characterize the pore structure of gelatin methacrylate hydrogel. The pictures obtained by machine vision method were used to calculate the deformed parameters of sample. The machine vision method adopted the discrete cosine transform for autofocus, and then used the image analysis and processing technology to identify and estimate the cell motion parameters. After getting the cell motion parameters, Comsol multiphysics (COMSOL) multiphysics multifield coupling finite element analysis software was adopted. The correlative numerical simulation method and gel deformed simulation method were used to obtain the mechanical changes of cells in the 3D mechanical microenvironment. Experimental results show that the modulus of gelatin methacrylate microgel is changed significantly during the tensile loading. The tensile strain and the cell spreading area are nonlinearly related. The increase in stiffness of the hydrogel substrate helps to promote cell proliferation to a certain extent.

Keywords

• machine vision
• cell
• three-dimensional mechanics
• microenvironment
• modeling analysis