Contactless micro-elastography of single cells using oscillating microbubbles as shear wave sources
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866914212320641024 |
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| author | Laloy-Borgna, Gabrielle Fauconnier, Maxime Grégoire, Sibylle Catheline, Stefan Inserra, Claude |
| author_facet | Laloy-Borgna, Gabrielle Fauconnier, Maxime Grégoire, Sibylle Catheline, Stefan Inserra, Claude |
| contents | The mechanical properties of cells play key roles in their physiology, function, physiological and pathological transformations. Micro-elastography has recently emerged as a promising tool to estimate cellular viscoelastic properties within a millisecond, without the need for mechanical modeling. Here, we report a fully contactless approach to single-cell micro-elastography, using acoustically oscillating gas microbubbles positioned near individual cells (20~\textmu m diameter megakaryocytes) as localized shear wave sources. Using this approach, we successfully performed micro-elastography on cells up to five times smaller than those studied in previous works, establishing the smallest single-cell elastography measurements to date. Spherical or non-spherical bubble oscillations generated 15~kHz elastic waves, which we detected using a high-speed camera coupled to a standard bright-field microscope. Noise correlation elastography enabled the measurement of average and local shear-wave velocities within single cells. Our results demonstrate that this method is robust and reproducible across multiple cells from the same cell line, paving the way for real-time, label-free mechanical monitoring of single cells during fast biological processes. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_18294 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Contactless micro-elastography of single cells using oscillating microbubbles as shear wave sources Laloy-Borgna, Gabrielle Fauconnier, Maxime Grégoire, Sibylle Catheline, Stefan Inserra, Claude Applied Physics The mechanical properties of cells play key roles in their physiology, function, physiological and pathological transformations. Micro-elastography has recently emerged as a promising tool to estimate cellular viscoelastic properties within a millisecond, without the need for mechanical modeling. Here, we report a fully contactless approach to single-cell micro-elastography, using acoustically oscillating gas microbubbles positioned near individual cells (20~\textmu m diameter megakaryocytes) as localized shear wave sources. Using this approach, we successfully performed micro-elastography on cells up to five times smaller than those studied in previous works, establishing the smallest single-cell elastography measurements to date. Spherical or non-spherical bubble oscillations generated 15~kHz elastic waves, which we detected using a high-speed camera coupled to a standard bright-field microscope. Noise correlation elastography enabled the measurement of average and local shear-wave velocities within single cells. Our results demonstrate that this method is robust and reproducible across multiple cells from the same cell line, paving the way for real-time, label-free mechanical monitoring of single cells during fast biological processes. |
| title | Contactless micro-elastography of single cells using oscillating microbubbles as shear wave sources |
| topic | Applied Physics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18294 |