Bovine Chondrocyte Visualization and Analysis

Confocal microscope images of bovine chondrocytes were employed to generate the geometries and finite element meshes. We used 27 original 16-bit grayscale images of the healthy control samples, obtained from the previous research conducted by Lv et al. (2019) (link). These images have a resolution of 2048 × 2048 pixels per slice with a stack size varied between samples. The voxel size is 0.1099 × 0.1099 × 1 µm. The bovine cartilage explants were dyed with a red fluorescent cell tracker (Red CMTPX Dye, Thermo Fisher), cultured in regular medium for four days prior to imaging, and imaged with a Zeiss LSM510 microscope. The benchmark for cell volume estimation in this study was based on the manually estimated cell volume from the previous study, with a detailed procedure provided in the Supplementary Materials.