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We describe a computational framework for the quantitative assessment of contractile responses of isolated neonatal cardiac myocytes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on a practical and accessible method for the assessment of contractility in neonatal cardiocytes. The proposed methodology is comprised of digital video recording of the contracting cell, signal preparation, representation by polar Fourier descriptors, and contractility assessment. The different processing stages are variants of mathematically sound and computationally robust algorithms very well established in the scientific community. The described computational approach provides a comprehensive assessment of the neonatal cardiac myocyte contraction without the need of elaborate instrumentation. The versatility of the methodology allows it to be employed in determining myocyte contractility almost simultaneously with the acquisition of the Ca2+ transient and other correlates of cell contraction. The proposed methodology can be utilized to evaluate changes in contractile behavior resulting from drug intervention, disease models, transgeneity, or other common applications of neonatal cardiocytes.

We describe a computational framework for the comprehensive assessment of contractile responses of enzymatically dissociated adult cardiac myocytes. The proposed methodology comprises the following stages: digital video recording of the contracting cell, edge preserving total variation-based image smoothing, segmentation of the smoothed images, contour extraction from the segmented images, shape representation by Fourier descriptors, and contractility assessment. The different stages are variants of mathematically sound and computationally robust algorithms very well established in the image processing community. The physiologic application of the methodology is evaluated by assessing overall contraction in enzymatically dissociated adult rat cardiocytes. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in characterizing the true, two-dimensional, “shortening” in the contraction process of adult cardiocytes. We compare the performance of the proposed method to that of a popular edge detection system in the literature. The proposed method not only provides a more comprehensive assessment of the myocyte contraction process but also can potentially eliminate historical concerns and sources of errors caused by myocyte rotation or translation during contraction. Furthermore, the versatility of the image processing techniques makes the method suitable for determining myocyte shortening in cells that usually bend or move during contraction. The proposed method can be utilized to evaluate changes in contractile behavior resulting from drug intervention, disease modeling, transgeneity, or other common applications to mammalian cardiocytes.