Mural-VISTA: A tool for mural cell-vessel interaction assessment and multiscale single-cell topo-morphological analysis

Mural-VISTA enables 3D profiling of mural cell-vessel interactions, revealing that altered RhoA activity changes pericyte and vSMC branch complexity, alignment, and solidity in reconstructed meshes.

• Why it matters: 2D maximum intensity projections obscure overlapping mural processes and cell-vessel contacts, limiting quantitative assessment of how mural cell morphology relates to vessel geometry.
• What they did: The semi-automated Python workflow performs mesh pretreatment, interactive centerline extraction, hierarchical segmentation of soma and process branches, and computes 37 multiscale vessel-referenced topo-morphological metrics.
• The result: Constitutively active RhoA over-expression reduced branch complexity and increased alignment in both pericytes and vSMCs, while increased whole-cell and branch solidity occurred only in vSMCs; dominant-negative RhoA increased branch abundance and reduced branch solidity in pericytes but not vSMCs.

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