Vascular network formation in silico using the extended cellular potts model

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases belong to the most widespread illnesses in the developed countries. Therefore, the regenerative medicine and tissue modeling applications are highly interested in studying the ability of endothelial cells, derived from human stem cells, to form vascular networks. Several characteristics can be measured on images of these networks and hence describe the quality of the endothelial cells. With advances in the image processing, automatic analysis of these complex images becomes increasingly common. In this study, we introduce a new graph structure and additional constraints to the cellular Potts model, a framework commonly utilized in computational biology. Our extension allows to generate visually plausible synthetic image sequences of evolving fluorescently labeled vascular networks with ground truth data. Such generated datasets can be subsequently used for testing and validating methods employed for the analysis and measurement of the images of real vascular networks.