u-inferforce (previous named Traction Force Microscopy or TFM) is a MATLAB software that reconstructs traction forces of cells adhered on elastic gel doped with beads. The software quantifies the deformation of the gel by image-based tracking of the beads from pairs of images, one displaying in the deformed and displaying the relaxed substrate. Traction force reconstruction is accomplished via L1-regularization, which is particularly good for identifying traction from small adhesions. It generates traction magnitude heat-maps as well as traction vector fields as outputs. The software additionally supports conventional L2-based BEM (Boundary Element Method) and FTTC (Fourier Transform Traction Cytometry).
The innovative parts of the reconstruction algorithms are published in Traction microscopy to identify force modulation in subresolution adhesions, Nature Methods, 2015, 12, 653–656, written by Sangyoon J Han, Youbean Oak, Alex Groisman, Gaudenz Danuser.
TFM (Traction Force Microscopy) has been renamed to u-inferforce. Please select u-inferforce from the analysis packages list to run the software.