Advancement of magnetomotive micro optical coherence tomography (μOCT) microrheology for probing mucus viscoelastic properties

We report the advancement of magnetomotive μOCT microrheology for measuring viscoelastic parameters of mucus in air-liquid interface cystic fibrosis (CF) cell cultures. We dispersed magnetic microbeads into the mucus and conducted a creep test by applying a constant magnetomotive force to the sample, while imaging the resulting mucus deformation using μOCT. The deformation of mucus compartments was then analyzed using ImageJ. The viscoelastic parameters were extracted by fitting the deformation to a power-law rheology model. Preliminary results showed that magnetomotive μOCT microrheology can probe the heterogeneous viscoelasticity of CF mucus in a spatially resolved manner.