Key result
Open-source PolNet enables network-level analysis of endothelial cell polarity and blood flow during vascular remodeling.
Why the study?
A tool enabling network-level quantification of endothelial cell polarity and blood flow during vascular remodelling was lacking.
PolNet provides a novel, open-source computational tool to quantify the relationship between endothelial cell polarity and hemodynamics, facilitating basic science research in vascular remodeling and angiogenesis.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Should not yet inform clinical practice; extends tools for network-level endothelial polarity analysis in animal models.
In this paper, 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 characterise the haemodynamics of the vascular networks under study. The tool enables, for the first time, network-level analysis of polarity and flow for individual endothelial cells. To date, PolNet has proven invaluable for the study of endothelial cell polarisation and migration during vascular patterning, as demonstrated by our recent papers [1, 2]. 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 LGPL licence.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Bernabéu et al. (2017) studied Vascular remodelling. PolNet software tool was evaluated. PolNet is an open-source software tool that enables network-level analysis of endothelial cell polarity and blood flow during vascular remodelling.
Synapse has enriched 8 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: