UFMTrack, an Under-Flow Migration Tracker enabling analysis of the entire multi-step immune cell extravasation cascade across the blood-brain barrier in microfluidic devices.

Abstract

The endothelial blood-brain barrier (BBB) strictly controls immune cell trafficking into the central nervous system (CNS). In neuroinflammatory diseases such as multiple sclerosis, this tight control is, however, disturbed, leading to immune cell infiltration into the CNS. The development of in vitro models of the BBB combined with microfluidic devices has advanced our understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms mediating the multistep T-cell extravasation across the BBB. A major bottleneck of these in vitro studies is the absence of a robust and automated pipeline suitable for analyzing and quantifying the sequential interaction steps of different immune cell subsets with the BBB under physiological flow in vitro. Here, we present the under-flow migration tracker (UFMTrack) framework for studying immune cell interactions with endothelial monolayers under physiological flow. We then showcase a pipeline built based on it to study the entire multistep extravasation cascade of immune cells across brain microvascular endothelial cells under physiological flow in vitro. UFMTrack achieves 90% track reconstruction efficiency and allows for scaling due to the reduction of the analysis cost and by eliminating experimenter bias. This allowed for an in-depth analysis of all behavioral regimes involved in the multistep immune cell extravasation cascade. The study summarizes how UFMTrack can be employed to delineate the interactions of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells with the BBB under physiological flow. We also demonstrate its applicability to the other BBB models, showcasing broader applicability of the developed framework to a range of immune cell-endothelial monolayer interaction studies. The UFMTrack framework along with the generated datasets is publicly available in the corresponding repositories.