Limits of Applicability of the Voronoi Tessellation Determined by Centers of Cell Nuclei to Epithelium Morphology

Kaliman S, Jayachandran C, Rehfeldt F, Smith AS (2016)

Publication Language: English

Publication Status: Published

Publication Type: Journal article, Original article

Publication year: 2016

Journal

Frontiers in Physiology Frontiers Media

Publisher: FRONTIERS MEDIA SA

Book Volume: 7

Article Number: 551

URI: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5122581/

DOI: 10.3389/fphys.2016.00551

Abstract

It is well accepted that cells in the tissue can be regarded as tiles tessellating space. A number of approaches were developed to find an appropriate mathematical description of such cell tiling. A particularly useful approach is the so called Voronoi tessellation, built from centers of mass of the cell nuclei (CMVT), which is commonly used for estimating the morphology of cells in epithelial tissues. However, a study providing a statistically sound analysis of this method's accuracy is not available in the literature. We addressed this issue here by comparing a number of morphological measures of the cells, including area, perimeter, and elongation obtained from such a tessellation with identical measures extracted from direct imaging acquired by staining the cell membranes. After analyzing the shapes of 15,000 MDCK II epithelial cells under several conditions, we find that CMVT reasonably well reproduces many of the morphological properties of the tissue with an error that is between 10 and 15%. Moreover, cross-correlations between different morphological measures are reproduced qualitatively correctly by this method. However, all of the properties including the cell perimeters, number of neighbors, and anisotropy measures often suffer from systematic or size dependent errors. These discrepancies originate from the polygonal nature of the tessellation which sets the limits of the applicability of CMVT.

Authors with CRIS profile

Sara Kaliman Physics Underlying Life Science Ana-Suncana Smith Physics Underlying Life Science

Additional Organisation(s)

Exzellenz-Cluster Engineering of Advanced Materials

Related research project(s)

Biological Membranes in Action: A Unified Approach to Complexation, Scaffolding and Active Transport (MEMBRANESACT) Oct. 1, 2013 - Sept. 30, 2019 GRK 1962: Dynamische Wechselwirkungen an Biologischen Membranen – von Einzelmolekülen zum Gewebe April 1, 2014 - Sept. 30, 2018

Involved external institutions

Georg-August-Universität Göttingen DE Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Kaliman, S., Jayachandran, C., Rehfeldt, F., & Smith, A.-S. (2016). Limits of Applicability of the Voronoi Tessellation Determined by Centers of Cell Nuclei to Epithelium Morphology. Frontiers in Physiology, 7. https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2016.00551

MLA:

Kaliman, Sara, et al. "Limits of Applicability of the Voronoi Tessellation Determined by Centers of Cell Nuclei to Epithelium Morphology." Frontiers in Physiology 7 (2016).

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