TY - JOUR A1 - Gupta, Pooja A1 - Gramatke, Annika A1 - Einspanier, Ralf A1 - Schütte, Christof A1 - von Kleist, Max A1 - Sharbati, Jutta T1 - In silico cytotoxicity assessment on cultured rat intestinal cells deduced from cellular impedance measurements JF - Toxicology in Vitro N2 - Early and reliable identification of chemical toxicity is of utmost importance. At the same time, reduction of animal testing is paramount. Therefore, methods that improve the interpretability and usability of in vitro assays are essential. xCELLigence’s real-time cell analyzer (RTCA) provides a novel, fast and cost effective in vitro method to probe compound toxicity. We developed a simple mathematical framework for the qualitative and quantitative assessment of toxicity for RTCA measurements. Compound toxicity, in terms of its 50% inhibitory concentration IC50 on cell growth, and parameters related to cell turnover were estimated on cultured IEC-6 cells exposed to 10 chemicals at varying concentrations. Our method estimated IC50 values of 113.05, 7.16, 28.69 and 725.15 μM for the apparently toxic compounds 2-acetylamino-fluorene, aflatoxin B1, benzo-[a]-pyrene and chloramphenicol in the tested cell line, in agreement with literature knowledge. IC50 values of all apparent in vivo non-toxic compounds were estimated to be non-toxic by our method. Corresponding estimates from RTCA’s in-built model gave false positive (toxicity) predictions in 5/10 cases. Taken together, our proposed method reduces false positive predictions and reliably identifies chemical toxicity based on impedance measurements. The source code for the developed method including instructions is available at https://git.zib.de/bzfgupta/toxfit/tree/master. KW - Real-time cell analyzer KW - Toxicity KW - Mathematical modeling Y1 - 2017 SN - 1438-0064 VL - 41 SP - 179 EP - 188 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wilson, David A1 - Anglin, Carolyn A1 - Ambellan, Felix A1 - Grewe, Carl Martin A1 - Tack, Alexander A1 - Lamecker, Hans A1 - Dunbar, Michael A1 - Zachow, Stefan T1 - Validation of three-dimensional models of the distal femur created from surgical navigation point cloud data for intraoperative and postoperative analysis of total knee arthroplasty JF - International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery N2 - Purpose: Despite the success of total knee arthroplasty there continues to be a significant proportion of patients who are dissatisfied. One explanation may be a shape mismatch between pre and post-operative distal femurs. The purpose of this study was to investigate a method to match a statistical shape model (SSM) to intra-operatively acquired point cloud data from a surgical navigation system, and to validate it against the pre-operative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from the same patients. Methods: A total of 10 patients who underwent navigated total knee arthroplasty also had an MRI scan less than 2 months pre-operatively. The standard surgical protocol was followed which included partial digitization of the distal femur. Two different methods were employed to fit the SSM to the digitized point cloud data, based on (1) Iterative Closest Points (ICP) and (2) Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The available MRI data were manually segmented and the reconstructed three-dimensional surfaces used as ground truth against which the statistical shape model fit was compared. Results: For both approaches, the difference between the statistical shape model-generated femur and the surface generated from MRI segmentation averaged less than 1.7 mm, with maximum errors occurring in less clinically important areas. Conclusion: The results demonstrated good correspondence with the distal femoral morphology even in cases of sparse data sets. Application of this technique will allow for measurement of mismatch between pre and post-operative femurs retrospectively on any case done using the surgical navigation system and could be integrated into the surgical navigation unit to provide real-time feedback. Y1 - 2017 UR - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11548-017-1630-5.pdf U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-017-1630-5 VL - 12 IS - 12 SP - 2097 EP - 2105 PB - Springer ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Benn, Andreas A1 - Hiepen, Christian A1 - Osterland, Marc A1 - Schütte, Christof A1 - Zwijsen, An A1 - Knaus, Petra T1 - Role of bone morphogenetic proteins in sprouting angiogenesis: differential BMP receptor-dependent signaling pathways balance stalk vs. tip cell competence JF - FASEB Journal N2 - Before the onset of sprouting angiogenesis, the endothelium is prepatterned for the positioning of tip and stalk cells. Both cell identities are not static, as endothelial cells (ECs) constantly compete for the tip cell position in a dynamic fashion. Here, we show that both bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) 2 and BMP6 are proangiogenic in vitro and ex vivo and that the BMP type I receptors, activin receptor-like kinase (ALK)3 and ALK2, play crucial and distinct roles in this process. BMP2 activates the expression of tip cell–associated genes, such as DLL4 (delta-like ligand 4) and KDR (kinase insert domain receptor), and p38-heat shock protein 27 (HSP27)–dependent cell migration, thereby generating tip cell competence. Whereas BMP6 also triggers collective cell migration via the p38-HSP27 signaling axis, BMP6 induces in addition SMAD1/5 signaling, thereby promoting the expression of stalk cell–associated genes, such as HES1 (hairy and enhancer of split 1) and FLT1 (fms-like tyrosine kinase 1). Specifically, ALK3 is required for sprouting from HUVEC spheroids, whereas ALK2 represses sprout formation. We demonstrate that expression levels and respective complex formation of BMP type I receptors in ECs determine stalk vs. tip cell identity, thus contributing to endothelial plasticity during sprouting angiogenesis. As antiangiogenic monotherapies that target the VEGF or ALK1 pathways have not fulfilled efficacy objectives in clinical trials, the selective targeting of the ALK2/3 pathways may be an attractive new approach. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.201700193RR VL - 31 IS - 11 SP - 4720 EP - 4733 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Winkelmann, Stefanie A1 - Schütte, Christof T1 - Hybrid models for chemical reaction networks: Multiscale theory and application to gene regulatory systems JF - The Journal of Chemical Physics N2 - Well-mixed stochastic chemical kinetics are properly modeled by the chemical master equation (CME) and associated Markov jump processes in molecule number space. If the reactants are present in large amounts, however, corresponding simulations of the stochastic dynamics become computationally expensive and model reductions are demanded. The classical model reduction approach uniformly rescales the overall dynamics to obtain deterministic systems characterized by ordinary differential equations, the well-known mass action reaction rate equations. For systems with multiple scales, there exist hybrid approaches that keep parts of the system discrete while another part is approximated either using Langevin dynamics or deterministically. This paper aims at giving a coherent overview of the different hybrid approaches, focusing on their basic concepts and the relation between them. We derive a novel general description of such hybrid models that allows expressing various forms by one type of equation. We also check in how far the approaches apply to model extensions of the CME for dynamics which do not comply with the central well-mixed condition and require some spatial resolution. A simple but meaningful gene expression system with negative self-regulation is analysed to illustrate the different approximation qualities of some of the hybrid approaches discussed. Especially, we reveal the cause of error in the case of small volume approximations. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4986560 VL - 147 IS - 11 SP - 114115-1 EP - 114115-18 ER -