Computational Assessment of Cardiac Hypertrophy in Zebrafish

It is well known that the zebrafish heart is physiologically analogous to the human heart, and that the transparency of zebrafish embryos allows for accurate bioimaging. The zebrafish heart model can be used in drug trials to assess the risk of cardiac hypertrophy as an unintended side effect for commercial drugs. By using pixel intensity and optical flow to express displacement, regions of interest were defined in a high throughput routine, and an inverse harmonic oscillation scheme was used to find the force of contractility of the zebrafish heart. We administered various drugs to zebrafish embryos, and by calculating the force of contractility from observed  displacement, we estimated the risk that each drug possesses for cardiac hypertrophy in humans. With this high throughput routine, minimal human intervention is needed to run large scale drug trials for cardiac hypertrophy.