ESB Webinar Series - No. 12 - TFMLAB

TFMLAB: a user-friendly toolbox to calculate cell forces in 3D in vitro models
The mechanical forces that cells exert on the surrounding extracellular matrix are crucial for many physiological and pathological processes. Traction Force Microscopy is the most commonly used methodology to quantify cell forces in vitro.
TFMLAB integrates all the computational steps to compute active cellular forces from confocal microscopy images, including image processing, cell segmentation, image alignment, matrix displacement measurement, and force recovery. Moreover, TFMLAB is accessible to non-technical users through interactive graphical user interfaces.
At the end of the webinar, attendees will learn:
- The basics of computational TFM
- How to set-up TFMLAB
- The basic steps to run TFMLAB with a real example
- Visualizing TFMLAB results with Paraview
The webinar will be conducted by Dr. Jorge Barrasa Fano. Jorge is a postdoctoral researcher at the Mechanobiology and Tissue Engineering group at KU Leuven. During his Ph.D., he focused on the development of computational methods to access mechanical information within 3D in vitro models of sprouting angiogenesis. The advanced in silico validation of these methods and the development of a user-friendly toolbox called TFMLAB were the main contributions of his Ph.D., which lead him to win the ESB Student Award in 2020. He recently obtained an FWO fellowship to carry out his postdoc research on the application of computational methods to in vitro experiments to investigate matrix remodeling and cell-ECM mechanics for disease.