Abstract
Mechanical interactions between cells and extracellular matrix (ECM) direct many important cellular processes such as proliferation, migration and differentiation. Cell-ECM interactions have been studied on 2D substrate so far, but it is obvious that cell function and behavior are different in 2D and 3D. So interest in 3D mechanical field of cellular microenvironment has been increased. However, little is known regarding to the relation between cell function and 3D mechanical field of cellular microenvironment. As a novel tool for quantitative 3D deformation measurement of microenvironment, digital volume correlation (DVC), which is able to quantify the 3D internal deformation across the entire volume of an object, has increasingly gained attention. In this paper DVC was developed by MATLAB in order to measure mechanical field of cellular microenvironment, and the accuracy of this DVC algorithm was evaluated by using computer-simulated 3D volume images with controlled displacements. Results reveal that this DVC program is enough to be applied in 3D cellular microenvironment displacement and strain calculation.
