Vasculogenesis

This web page is a supplementary material to the paper Vascular Network Formation in Silico Using the Extended Cellular Potts Model that was presented at IEEE International Conference on Image Processing ICIP 2016 hold in Phoenix, Arizona, USA in September 2016.

Summary

Cardiovascular diseases belong to the most widespread illnesses in the developed countries. Therefore, the regenerative medicine and tissue modeling applications are highly interested in studying the ability of endothelial cells, derived from human stem cells, to form vascular networks. Several characteristics can be measured on images of these networks and hence describe the quality of the endothelial cells. With advances in the image processing, automatic analysis of these complex images becomes increasingly common.

In this paper, we introduce a new graph structure and additional constraints to the cellular Potts model, framework commonly utilized in computational biology. Our extension allows to generate visually plausible synthetic image sequences of evolving fluorescently labeled vascular networks with ground truth data. Such generated datasets can be subsequently used for testing and validating methods employed for the analysis and measurement of the images of real vascular networks.

Sample Sequence

The aim of this project is to study, understand and simulate the development of vascular networks formed during the process called vasculogenesis. During vasculogenesis, the cells, initially spread across the glass slide, tend to attach each other and form the networks with thin and elongated chords. This process forces some cells to be markedly elongated, as can be seen in the figures below (left - real experimental data, right - synthetic computer generated data).

fig 1 fig 2

In the following videos, you can also watch the dynamics of the generatred network. In the first stage, the cells attach each other. Afterwards, some of them form the clusters whereas the others elongate.

References

Svoboda D, Ulman V, Kováč P, Šalingová B, Tesařová L, Koutná IK, Matula P. Vascular Network Formation in Silico Using the Extended Cellular Potts Model, In IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Phoenix, Arizona (USA), 2016, pp. 3180-3183.

Acknowledgement

This project was funded by Czech Science Foundation, grant No. GA14-22461S.