Fig. 3

Pipeline of the synthetic data generation. From the ideal tractions, using the forward equation, the ideal displacements are computed. The simulator generates a synthetic relaxed hydrogel volume with fluorescent beads randomly distributed inside. The beads are distorted simulating the acquisition on a confocal microscope and the volume, contaminated by the characteristic noise. Based on the biomechanic properties selected for the hydrogel (namely, Young modulus and Poisson ratio), the stressed hydrogel is generated. Finally, using the stressed and relaxed hydrogels the inverse problem is solved using any of the presented approaches and tractions are recovered and compared with the ideal