27 research outputs found
Quantitative analysis and comparison of 3D morphology between viable and apoptotic MCF-7 breast cancer cells and characterization of nuclear fragmentation
Morphological changes in apoptotic cells provide essential markers for defining and detection
of apoptosis as a fundamental mechanism of cell death. Among these changes, the
nuclear fragmentation and condensation have been regarded as the important markers but
quantitative characterization of these changes is yet to be achieved. We have acquired confocal
image stacks of 206 viable and apoptotic MCF-7 cells stained by three fluorescent
dyes. Three-dimensional (3D) parameters were extracted to quantify and compare their differences
in morphology. To analyze nuclear fragmentation, a new method has been developed
to determine clustering of nuclear voxels in the reconstructed cells due to fluorescence
intensity changes in nuclei of apoptotic cells. The results of these studies reveal that the 3D
morphological changes in cytoplasm and nuclear membranes in apoptotic cells provide sensitive
targets for label-free detection and staging of apoptosis. Furthermore, the clustering
analysis and morphological data on nuclear fragmentation are highly useful for derivation of
optical cell models and simulation of diffraction images to investigate light scattering by
early apoptotic cells, which can lead to future development of label-free and rapid methods
of apoptosis assay based on cell morphology.Open Access Fundin
Evaluations on underdetermined blind source separation in adverse environments using time-frequency masking
The successful implementation of speech processing systems in the real world depends on its ability to handle adverse acoustic conditions with undesirable factors such as room reverberation and background noise. In this study, an extension to the established multiple sensors degenerate unmixing estimation technique (MENUET) algorithm for blind source separation is proposed based on the fuzzy c-means clustering to yield improvements in separation ability for underdetermined situations using a nonlinear microphone array. However, rather than test the blind source separation ability solely on reverberant conditions, this paper extends this to include a variety of simulated and real-world noisy environments. Results reported encouraging separation ability and improved perceptual quality of the separated sources for such adverse conditions. Not only does this establish this proposed methodology as a credible improvement to the system, but also implies further applicability in areas such as noise suppression in adverse acoustic environments