ReViMS: Software Tool for Estimating the Volumes of 3-D Multicellular Spheroids Imaged Using a Light Sheet Fluorescence Microscope

Cancer 3-D spheroids are widely used to test drugs and radiotherapy treatments. These 3-D cell clusters range from tens to hundreds of micrometers in size, with shapes that typically differ from a perfect sphere. Change in spheroid volume is one of the most important parameters for evaluating treatment efficacy, and using light sheet fluorescence microscopes (LSFM), optical sections of samples in that size range can be obtained. However, there remains a lack of validated methods for quantifying the volumes of 3-D multicellular aggregates. Here, we present Reconstruction and Visualization from Multiple Sections (ReViMS), an open-source, user-friendly software for automatically segmenting z-stacks of fluorescence images and estimating the volumes of 3-D multicellular spheroids. To assess the precision and accuracy of the volume estimates obtained with ReViMS, we used several cancer spheroids imaged with LSFM. Both the precision and accuracy were >95%, demonstrating the effectiveness of ReViMS.