Software

TFM (Traction Force Microscopy) is a MATLAB software that reconstructs traction forces of cells adhered on elastic gel doped with beads. The software quantifies the deformation of the gel by image-based tracking of the beads from pairs of images, one displaying in the deformed and displaying the relaxed substrate. Traction force reconstruction is accomplished via L1-regularization, which is particularly good for identifying traction from small adhesions. It generates traction magnitude heat-maps as well as traction vector fields as outputs. The software additionally supports conventional L2-based BEM (Boundary Element Method) and FTTC (Fourier Transform Traction Cytometry).

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The innovative parts of the reconstruction algorithms are published in Han et al., Nature Methods (2015)