Determining substrate displacement and cell traction fields—a new approach

This paper presents a new approach for the traction force microscopy (TFM) method which determines traction forces exerted by adherent cells on a thin, elastic polyacrylamide gel embedded with fluorescent microbeads. In this enhanced TFM method, a pattern recognition technique is first applied to match the pair of microbead embedded images before and after deformation, which subsequently provides the displacement field of the elastic substrate. Once the displacement field is obtained, the 3-D finite element method (FEM) is used to compute cell traction forces. The new TFM has been applied to determine traction forces of human tendon fibroblasts. Compared to existing TFM methods, the present method has the following advantages: (1) its displacement field obtained is associated with microbead movements; (2) it considers the finite thickness of the thin polyacrylamide gel and is therefore free from the infinite half-space approximation adopted by existing TFM methods; and (3) its computation procedure for determining cell traction forces is fast.