  Human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) are an
effective tool for studying cardiac function and disease, and hold promise for
screening drug effects on human tissue. Changes to motion patterns in these
cells are one of the important features to be characterized to understand how
an introduced drug or disease may alter the human heart beat. However,
quantifying motion accurately and efficiently from optical measurements using
microscopy is currently lacking. In this work, we present a unified framework
for performing motion analysis on a sequence of microscopically obtained images
of tissues consisting of hiPSC-CMs. We provide validation of our developed
software using a synthetic test case and show how it can be used to extract
displacements and velocities in hiPSC-CM microtissues. Finally, we show how to
apply the framework to quantify the effect of an inotropic compound. The
described software system is distributed as a python package that is easy to
install, well tested and can be integrated into any python workflow.
