 TFM utilizes experimentally observed ECM displacements to calculate the traction, or stress vector, at the surface of a cell.Before TFM, efforts observed cellular tractions on silicone rubber substrata wrinkling around cells; however, accurate quantification of the tractions in such a technique is difficult due to the nonlinear and unpredictable behavior of the wrinkling.Several years later, the terminology TFM was introduced to describe a more advanced computational procedure that was created to convert measurements of substrate deformation into estimated traction stresses.