Abstract
Vascular endothelial cells are affected by the mechanical environment in cyclically inflated arteries and respond adaptively to various forms of mechanical stimuli. Therefore, it is important to understand how the endothelial cells perceive the mechanical forces from the substrate and to quantitatively correlate this with cellular responses. In this study, we analyzed the displacement field for cultured endothelial cell bottom on a silicon substrate using sliced images of cells obtained by confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM). We measured the coordinates of the feature points on CLSM images of the endothelial cell bottom before and after stretching of the silicon substrate and calculated the relative displacement of the feature points. Experiments involving six cells when the substrate was stretched by 15 % showed that the cell bottom was almost uniformly deformed similar to the substrate. But, the displacements near the periphery of the cells were not uniform due to the blur of the acquired images.
