UC Irvine

The myocardium consists of complex tissue structures that are intricately organized to maintain proper organ function. Though many methods exist for studying cardiac tissue architecture, current in vitro studies do not use consistent approaches for characterizing changes in myocardium structure, which is exist in heart disease. This lack of consistency makes it challenging to compare organization between multiple constructs and tissue types. This work will demonstrate in vitro tools that can quantify the orientational organization of multiple cardiac tissue constructs for comparison as well as quantify the correlation between pairs of constructs. To show the benefits of this method, this study explores the results of the orientational order parameter of multiple spatial and temporal scales and the co-orientational order parameter on engineered cardiac tissues. The results of this study quantitatively show characteristic spatial and temporal scales of organization as well as the level of correlation between pairs of structures. The information gained from this method provides insight into many architectural properties that can be directly compared to data from a variety of other intracellular constructs in normal, diseased, and stem cell-derived cardiac tissues.