Motility contrast imaging and tissue dynamics spectroscopy

Abstract

Motion is the defining physiological characteristic of living matter. If we are interested in how things function, then the way they move is most informative. Motion provides an endogenous and functional suite of biomarkers that are sensitive to subtle changes that occur under applied pharmacological doses or cellular stresses. This chapter reviews the application of biodynamic imaging to measure cellular dynamics in three-dimensional tissue culture for drug screening applications. Nanoscale and microscale motions are detected through statistical fluctuations in dynamic speckle across an ensemble of cells within each resolution voxel. Tissue dynamics spectroscopy generates drug-response spectrograms that serve as phenotypic fingerprints of drug action and can differentiate responses from heterogeneous regions of tumor tissue.