Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Open Access Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering (MS)
Administrative Home Department
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Advisor 1
Sangyoon Han
Committee Member 1
Hoda Hatoum
Committee Member 2
Jingfeng Jiang
Abstract
Traction Force Microscopy (TFM) is a powerful technique for quantifying cellular traction forces, yet its accuracy is dependent on the force reconstruction algorithm used to recover traction forces from the input substrate deformations. As such, the use cases of TFM are dependent on the types of reconstruction algorithms available. To expand the usability of TFM onto micropatterned substrates, we introduce gFEM, a novel force reconstruction method that incorporates the specific grooved topography of the user’s experimental substrate into the solution process. Unlike other traditionally used models, which assume a flat and continuous substrate, gFEM aims to improve the fidelity of traction recoveries by integrating the substrate geometry into its finite element-based solution. The gFEM method was benchmarked against a reconstruction algorithm which assumes a flat substrate (flatFEM) on synthetic datasets which were generated using a finite element model. The synthetic datasets consisted of direct displacement inputs as well as bead image tracking data. Results show that gFEM produced more accurate traction maps with lower noise sensitivity when compared against the flatFEM method in direct displacement cases. In general, the flatFEM algorithm produced systemic underestimation of traction values compared to the ground truth. This was attributed to the difference in the basis functions of the two methods. However, when applied to synthetic bead images, both models yielded comparable performance with minimal statistically significant differences observed. This outcome was attributed to the poor recovery of displacements within groove valleys during the image correlation-based bead tracking process. Despite this limitation, the gFEM model represents a step towards more accurate force reconstructions on topographically complex substrates. To that end, the current implementation of gFEM is freely available online, as one of the force reconstruction methods in the TFM package, so that others can utilize and improve upon the algorithm. In addition, our future work will focus on improvements to the bead tracking process which will yield better results in subsequent force reconstructions.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Haarman, Samuel E., "DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF NOVEL FORCE RECONSTRUCTION ALGORITHM FOR TRACTION FORCE MICROSCOPY", Open Access Master's Thesis, Michigan Technological University, 2025.