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Updated: Feb 10, 2026

In Vitro Model of Physiological and Pathological Blood Flow with Application to Investigations of Vascular Cell Remodeling
Published on: November 3, 2015
PolNet: A Tool to Quantify Network-Level Cell Polarity and Blood Flow in Vascular Remodeling
Miguel O Bernabeu1, Martin L Jones2, Rupert W Nash3
1Centre for Medical Informatics, Usher Institute, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Centre for Computational Science, Department of Chemistry, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
None:
In this article, we present PolNet, an open-source software tool for the study of blood flow and cell-level biological activity during vessel morphogenesis. We provide an image acquisition, segmentation, and analysis protocol to quantify endothelial cell polarity in entire in vivo vascular networks. In combination, we use computational fluid dynamics to characterize the hemodynamics of the vascular networks under study. The tool enables, to our knowledge for the first time, a network-level analysis of polarity and flow for individual endothelial cells. To date, PolNet has proven invaluable for the study of endothelial cell polarization and migration during vascular patterning, as demonstrated by two recent publications. Additionally, the tool can be easily extended to correlate blood flow with other experimental observations at the cellular/molecular level. We release the source code of our tool under the Lesser General Public License.
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