I had the opportunity to write a commentary together with Dr. Crystal Ripplinger from UC Davis in PNAS entitled Paralysis by analysis: Overcoming cardiac contraction with computer vision. In our commentary, we discuss the recent advances in optical mapping of contracting tissues, and specifically discuss a recent article by Louis Woodhams, Nathaniel Huebsch, Guy Genin and others: Virtual blebbistatin: A robust and rapid software approach to motion artifact removal in optical mapping of cardiomyocytes. In their article, Woodhams et al. demonstrate a new technique to suppress motion artifacts in fluorescence video recordings of cardiac cell cultures using numerical methods. The work has many similarities with our previous work [1, 2], and the algorithms they use are comparable to our software optimap. However, their software uses strain estimation techniques, which promise to be more robust over techniques which derive strain from displacement vector fields.