Centre for Medical Informatics, Usher Institute, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Centre for Computational Science, Department of Chemistry, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Electron Microscopy Science Technology Platform, The Francis Crick Institute, London, United Kingdom.
Biophys J. 2018 May 8;114(9):2052-2058. doi: 10.1016/j.bpj.2018.03.032.
In this article, we present PolNet, an open-source software tool for the study of blood flow and cell-level biological activity during vessel morphogenesis. We provide an image acquisition, segmentation, and analysis protocol to quantify endothelial cell polarity in entire in vivo vascular networks. In combination, we use computational fluid dynamics to characterize the hemodynamics of the vascular networks under study. The tool enables, to our knowledge for the first time, a network-level analysis of polarity and flow for individual endothelial cells. To date, PolNet has proven invaluable for the study of endothelial cell polarization and migration during vascular patterning, as demonstrated by two recent publications. Additionally, the tool can be easily extended to correlate blood flow with other experimental observations at the cellular/molecular level. We release the source code of our tool under the Lesser General Public License.
在本文中，我们介绍了 PolNet，这是一种用于研究血管形态发生过程中血流和细胞水平生物活性的开源软件工具。我们提供了一种图像采集、分割和分析协议，用于量化整个体内血管网络中内皮细胞的极性。结合使用，我们使用计算流体动力学来描述所研究的血管网络的血液动力学。据我们所知，该工具首次能够对单个内皮细胞的极性和流动进行网络级分析。迄今为止，PolNet 已被证明对于研究血管形成过程中的内皮细胞极化和迁移非常有价值，最近的两篇出版物证明了这一点。此外，该工具可以很容易地扩展到将血流与细胞/分子水平的其他实验观察结果相关联。我们根据较宽松通用公共许可证发布了我们工具的源代码。
