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Published on: September 5, 2020
Quantifying the spatiotemporal mechanical dynamics of engineered cardiac microbundles
Hiba Kobeissi1,2, Samuel J DePalma3, Javiera Jilberto3
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
Plos Computational Biology
|July 20, 2026
Summary
We developed an open computational pipeline to analyze cardiac microbundle contractions, revealing continuous variations in tissue dynamics rather than distinct clusters. This framework enhances reproducibility in cardiac tissue engineering research.
Area of Science:
- Biomedical Engineering
- Cardiovascular Research
- Computational Biology
Background:
- Brightfield time-lapse imaging is crucial for cardiac tissue engineering but lacks standardized analytical frameworks, hindering reproducibility.
- Existing methods struggle with consistent quantification of spatiotemporal dynamics in engineered cardiac tissues.
Purpose of the Study:
- To present an open, scalable computational pipeline for quantifying spatiotemporal contractile dynamics in human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiac microbundles.
- To define a suite of interpretable metrics for tissue deformation, synchrony, and heterogeneity.
- To enable reproducible and comparable analysis of dynamic tissue mechanics.
Main Methods:
- Developed an open-source computational pipeline integrating MicroBundleCompute and MicroBundlePillarTrack.
- Implemented full-field displacement tracking, strain reconstruction, spatial registration, dimensionality reduction, and topology-based vector-field analysis.
- Defined 16 structural, functional, and spatiotemporal metrics and applied redundancy analysis to identify a core set of 10 informative metrics.
Main Results:
- The pipeline analyzed 670 cardiac microbundles across 20 experimental conditions.
- Continuous variation in contractile phenotypes was observed, with intra-condition variability often exceeding inter-condition differences.
- Contraction is primarily driven by a global isotropic mode, with localized saddle-type deformation patterns in about half of samples.
Conclusions:
- The open computational pipeline provides a standardized and scalable framework for analyzing cardiac microbundle contractility.
- The findings highlight continuous phenotypic variation, emphasizing the need for nuanced analytical approaches in cardiac tissue engineering.
- Openly released software and workflows promote reproducibility and cross-platform comparability in dynamic tissue mechanics research.
