Quantifying vasculature: new measures applied to arterial trees in the quail chorioallantoic membrane.
The aim of this study was to describe and analyze the regulation and spatio-temporal dynamics of melanocyte migration in vitro and its coupling to cell division and interaction with the matrix. The melanocyte lineage is particularly interesting because it is involved in both embryonic development and oncogenesis/metastasis (melanoma). Biological experiments were performed on two melanocyte cell lines established from wild-type and β-catenin-transgenic...
Background: Community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA), a novel strain of MRSA, has recently emerged and rapidly spread in the community. Invasion into the hospital setting with replacement of the hospital-acquired MRSA (HA-MRSA) has also been documented. Co-colonization with both CA-MRSA and HA-MRSA would have important clinical implications given differences in antimicrobial susceptibility profiles and the potential...
In this paper we explore a new model of field carcinogenesis, inspired by lung cancer precursor lesions, which includes dynamics of a spatially distributed population of pre-cancerous cells c(t, x), constantly supplied by an influx μ of mutated normal cells. Cell proliferation is controlled by growth factor molecules bound to cells, b(t, x). Free growth factor molecules g(t, x) are produced by precancerous cells and may diffuse before they become bound to other cells. The purpose of modelling is...
In this paper the authors raise the issue of automatic discrimination of atherosclerotic plaques within an artery lumen based on numerical and statistical thresholding of Computerized Tomography Angiographic (CTA) images and their advanced dimensioning as a support for preoperative vessel assessment. For the study, a set of tomograms of the aorta, as well as the ilio-femoral and femoral arteries were examined. In each case a sequence of about 130-480 images of the artery cutoff planes were analyzed...
Ionizing radiation activates a large variety of intracellular mechanisms responsible for maintaining appropriate cell functionality or activation of apoptosis which eliminates damaged cells from the population. The mechanism of such induced cellular death is widely used in radiotherapy in order to eliminate cancer cells, although in some cases it is highly limited by increased cellular radio-resistance due to aberrations in molecular regulation mechanisms of malignant cells. Despite the positive...
The fully coupled description of blood flow and mass transport in blood vessels requires extremely robust numerical methods. In order to handle the heterogeneous coupling between blood flow and plasma filtration, addressed by means of Navier-Stokes and Darcy's equations, we need to develop a numerical scheme capable to deal with extremely variable parameters, such as the blood viscosity and Darcy's permeability of the arterial walls. In this paper, we describe a finite element method for...
The fully coupled description of blood flow and mass transport in blood vessels requires extremely robust numerical methods. In order to handle the heterogeneous coupling between blood flow and plasma filtration, addressed by means of Navier-Stokes and Darcy's equations, we need to develop a numerical scheme capable to deal with extremely variable parameters, such as the blood viscosity and Darcy's permeability of the arterial walls. In this paper, we describe a finite element method for...
This paper describes three cytological image segmentation methods. The analysis includes the watershed algorithm, active contouring and a cellular automata GrowCut method. One can also find here a description of image pre-processing, Hough transform based pre-segmentation and an automatic nuclei localization mechanism used in our approach. Preliminary experimental results collected on a benchmark database present the quality of the methods in the analyzed issue. The discussion of common errors and...
DNA microarrays provide a new technique of measuring gene expression, which has attracted a lot of research interest in recent years. It was suggested that gene expression data from microarrays (biochips) can be employed in many biomedical areas, e.g., in cancer classification. Although several, new and existing, methods of classification were tested, a selection of proper (optimal) set of genes, the expressions of which can serve during classification, is still an open problem. Recently we have...