176 research outputs found
Artificial intelligence : Training the trainer
Including artificial intelligence in haematological education is compulsory but should not be limited to students. Experienced haematologist and decision-makers in the clinical environment have at least similar needs. This is because of the tremendous potential, opportunities and benefits the timely inclusion of artificial intelligence offers in diagnosis, prediction and personalised therapy
Classification of red blood cell shapes in flow using outlier tolerant machine learning
The manual evaluation, classification and counting of biological objects
demands for an enormous expenditure of time and subjective human input may be a
source of error. Investigating the shape of red blood cells (RBCs) in
microcapillary Poiseuille flow, we overcome this drawback by introducing a
convolutional neural regression network for an automatic, outlier tolerant
shape classification. From our experiments we expect two stable geometries: the
so-called `slipper' and `croissant' shapes depending on the prevailing flow
conditions and the cell-intrinsic parameters. Whereas croissants mostly occur
at low shear rates, slippers evolve at higher flow velocities. With our method,
we are able to find the transition point between both `phases' of stable shapes
which is of high interest to ensuing theoretical studies and numerical
simulations. Using statistically based thresholds, from our data, we obtain
so-called phase diagrams which are compared to manual evaluations.
Prospectively, our concept allows us to perform objective analyses of
measurements for a variety of flow conditions and to receive comparable
results. Moreover, the proposed procedure enables unbiased studies on the
influence of drugs on flow properties of single RBCs and the resulting
macroscopic change of the flow behavior of whole blood.Comment: 15 pages, published in PLoS Comput Biol, open acces
The buckling instability of aggregating red blood cells
Plasma proteins such as fibrinogen induce the aggregation of red blood cells
(RBC) into rouleaux, which are responsible for the pronounced shear thinning
behavior of blood, control the erythro- cyte sedimentation rate (ESR) a common
hematological test and are involved in many situations of physiological
relevance such as structuration of blood in the microcirculation or clot
formation in pathological situations. Confocal microscopy is used to
characterize the shape of RBCs within rouleaux at equilibrium as a function of
macromolecular concentration, revealing the diversity of contact zone
morphology. Three different configurations that have only been partly predicted
before are identified, namely parachute, male-female and sigmoid shapes, and
quantitatively recovered by numerical simulations. A detailed experimental and
theoretical analysis of clusters of two cells shows that the deformation
increases nonlinearly with the interaction energy. Models indicate a forward
bifurcation in which the contacting membrane undergoes a buckling instability
from a flat to a de- formed contact zone at a critical value of the interaction
energy. These results are not only relevant for the understanding of the
morphology and stability of RBC aggregates, but also for a whole class of
interacting soft deformable objects such as vesicles, capsules or cells in
tissues.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figure
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