Real-time modeling and control of the circular cell membranes strain

Making changes of cells function by regulating the external mechanical environment is one of the major interests in the mechanobiology field. Based on extensive studies, force at nano-to-micro newton and geometric shape changes at nano to-micrometer are the physical stimuli that can be sensed by cells. It has been postulated that controllable cell responses can be produced by activating diversity of mechanosesory proteins through physical changes of force or shape. In this paper, a real-time machine vision algorithm is proposed to improve the efficiency and robustness of the cell membranes strain calculation. The proposed adaptive image thresholding method with modified numerical implementation is able to apply on all the images captured in the deforming process to extract the deformed cell boundary in real-time. Based on the proposed method, the cell membrane strain is modeled and controlled to deform the cell into a predefined deformation. It enables biologists to study the biochemical changes within the cell by providing a controllable geometric changes. It also expects that a particular cell status or function could be produced by giving a proper deformation.