Citation:
jawerth2017.pdf | 13.97 MB |
Abstract:
Biopolymer networks provide mechanical integrity in many important environments in vivo ranging from the cytoskeleton within a cell to the structural support of cells themselves in tissues and tendons. Rheolog-ical studies have shown that they exhibit many unique material properties. Modelling these properties requires a precise knowledge of how the individual filaments in the network deform locally during a global deformation. Here, we present an image processing method to track the three-dimensional motion of a biopolymer network as a simple shear deformation is applied. We track the structure of the network from one shear position to the next by determining the displacement of each branch point using a cross-correlation. To illustrate the use of this algorithm, we apply it to a fluorescently labelled fibrin network.