Efficient Modeling of 3D Epithelial Cell Structure Dynamics via Backbone Spreads

Javier Buceta, Stefan Funke, Sabine Storandt

2025

Abstract

An important means to study the morphogenesis of epithelial cell structures is faithful modeling and simulation of the underlying cell dynamics. In particular, changes in cell shapes and cell neighborhoods have to be captured to gain understanding of organ development and other complex processes. A typical 2D tissue model is cell-center based Voronoi tessellation. However, since epithelial cells form curved layers in three-dimensional space, a 2D model cannot encompass all relevant aspects. In this paper, we provide a formal 3D model for epithelial cell structures based on the notion of backbone spreads and study its geometric properties. Based thereupon, we devise a modified version of the well-known Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to find cell tissue configurations that minimize a given energy function. We prove that our new algorithm is very efficient from a theoretical perspective and also demonstrate its good performance in practice on the example of tubular epithelia. Furthermore, we show that a rich set of cell shapes and connectivity structures emerge in our model, and we analyze their frequency of occurrence with respect to the model parameters.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Buceta J., Funke S. and Storandt S. (2025). Efficient Modeling of 3D Epithelial Cell Structure Dynamics via Backbone Spreads. In Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-728-3, SciTePress, pages 89-100. DOI: 10.5220/0013151000003912

in Bibtex Style

@conference{grapp25,
author={Javier Buceta and Stefan Funke and Sabine Storandt},
title={Efficient Modeling of 3D Epithelial Cell Structure Dynamics via Backbone Spreads},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP},
year={2025},
pages={89-100},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013151000003912},
isbn={978-989-758-728-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP
TI - Efficient Modeling of 3D Epithelial Cell Structure Dynamics via Backbone Spreads
SN - 978-989-758-728-3
AU - Buceta J.
AU - Funke S.
AU - Storandt S.
PY - 2025
SP - 89
EP - 100
DO - 10.5220/0013151000003912
PB - SciTePress