Biomedical Imaging
We have worked with medical research teams to develop customized, high-performance low-cost 3D fluorescence microscopy solutions for applications in cancer and COVID-19 research. This also led us to apply some of our standard and custom machine-learning and artificial intelligence image processing algorithms in these areas, and also branching out into ocular health, and neuroscience applications.
As
an example of why this astronomy-to-cells transfer is interesting,
see the image above. On the left we have a distant
gravitationally-lensed galaxy cluster, imaged by the Hubble Space
Telescope and our group's CIRCE infrared camera on the Gran
Telescopio Canarias (image credit: R. Deno Stelter and S.
Eikenberry). On the right is a colo-rectal cancer tumoroid suspended
and grown in liquid-like solid, being attacked by T-cells (image
credit: Greg Sawyer and the UF Cancer Engineering Lab). While the
scientific contexts are completely different, the image features and
quite similar, allowing the same software tools to be applied to
both for detecting, tracking, and characterizing individual
features. More coming soon!