Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.
J Biomech. 2011 Feb 3;44(3):567-73. doi: 10.1016/j.jbiomech.2010.09.012. Epub 2010 Sep 24.
This communication extends the recently reported cell-specific finite element (FE) method in Slomka and Gefen (2010) in which geometrically realistic FE cell models are created from confocal microscopy scans for large deformation analyses. The cell-specific FE method is extended here in the following aspects: (i) we demonstrate that cell-specific FE is versatile enough to deal with cells of substantially different geometrical shapes. The examples of an "elongated" pre-adipocyte and a "round" mature adipocyte are used to demonstrate this feature. (ii) We demonstrate that cell-specific FE can be used to analyze the mechanical behavior of cells that incorporate complex intracellular structures and are subjected to large deformations--again through the example of an adipocyte which contains a multitude of lipid droplets, each having a different size and shape. By demonstrating feasibility of inclusion of such inhomogeneities in the cytoplasm, the present work paves the way for modeling cellular organelles such as Golgi bodies, lysosomes and mitochondria in mechanically loaded cells using cell-specific FE.
本研究扩展了 Slomka 和 Gefen（2010）最近报道的细胞特定有限元（FE）方法，该方法使用共聚焦显微镜扫描创建几何逼真的 FE 细胞模型，用于大变形分析。在此，对细胞特定 FE 方法进行了以下方面的扩展：（i）我们证明了细胞特定 FE 具有足够的通用性，可以处理具有明显不同几何形状的细胞。通过一个“拉长”的前脂肪细胞和一个“圆”的成熟脂肪细胞的例子来说明这一特性。（ii）我们证明了细胞特定 FE 可用于分析包含复杂细胞内结构并受到大变形的细胞的力学行为——再次通过一个含有大量具有不同大小和形状的脂滴的脂肪细胞的例子来说明这一点。通过证明在细胞质中包含这种不均匀性的可行性，本工作为使用细胞特定 FE 对机械加载细胞中的细胞器（如高尔基体、溶酶体和线粒体）进行建模铺平了道路。
