Novel Analysis Method for Beating Cells Videomicroscopy Data: Functional Characterization of Culture Samples

Cell culture of cardiac tissue analog is becoming increasingly interesting for regenerative medicine (cell therapy and tissue engineering) and is widely used for high throughput cardiotoxicity. As a cost-effective approach to rapidly discard new compounds with high toxicity risks, cardiotoxicity evaluation is firstly done in vitro requiring cells/tissue with physiological/pathological characteristics (close to in vivo properties). Studying multicellular electrophysiological and contractile properties is needed to assess drug effects. Techniques favoring process automation which could help in simplifying screening drug candidates are thus of central importance. A lot of effort has been made to ameliorate in vitro models including several in vitro platforms for engineering neonatal rat cardiac tissues. However, most of the initial evaluation is done by studying the rate of activity. In this study, we present new approaches that use the videomicroscopy video of monolayer activity to study contractile properties of beating cells in culture. Two new variables are proposed which are linked to the contraction dynamics and are dependent on the rhythm of activity. Methods for evaluation of regional synchronicity within the image field of view are also presented that can rapidly determine regions with abnormal activity or heterogeneity in contraction dynamics.