Integrative analysis of the colorectal cancer proteome : potential clinical impact

Peer reviewedPostprin

Live Cell Biomass Tracking for Basic, Translational, and Clinical Research

Single cell mass is tightly regulated throughout generations and the cell cycle, making it an important marker of cell health. Abnormal changes in cell size can be the first indication of dysfunction in response to environmental stimuli such as cytotoxic drugs. Described here is the further development of high-speed live cell interferometry (HSLCI) to concurrently measure the changes in single cell mass of thousands of cells over time. Critically, the high-throughput nature of HSLCI provides realistic pictures of tumor heterogeneity. This throughput enabled HSLCI to correctly predict in vivo carboplatin sensitivity of three triple negative breast cancer patient derived xenografts, while also characterizing the spectrum of drug response from apoptosis to senescence to drug resistance. HSLCI quantified previous qualitative observations of increases in cell size and losses in cell density in senescent cells, and importantly observed proliferative recovery in cells demonstrating thee senescent characteristics. Furthermore, the addition of a micropipette system has enabled the isolation of rare (~1%) drug resistant cells for further study with molecular biology methods. Together, this work highlights HSLCI’s versatility and potential for clinical, translational, and basic research

A Comprehensive Study of Extramural Venous Invasion in Colorectal Cancer

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Proteomics for early detection of colorectal cancer : recent updates

Funding: This manuscript was not funded.Peer reviewedPostprin

Recent advances in understanding the roles of matrix metalloproteinases in tumour invasion and metastasis

Peer reviewedPostprin

The expression and prognostic significance of retinoic acid metabolising enzymes in colorectal cancer

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Automated video processing and image analysis software to support visual inspection of AGR cores

Remote visual inspection of fuel channels in Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR) cores provides nuclear operators with an understanding of the condition of the UK’s fleet of nuclear power plants. During planned, periodic outages, specialist inspection tools equipped with video cameras and other sensors are manipulated inside fuel channels selected for inspection and a video of the entire channel bore is recorded for each. If cracks are observed in this process, a montage of the entire crack region needs to be: produced, analysed and sentenced (classifying the crack morphology, location, orientation and size) before the station is returned to service – provided it is safe to do so. At the present time, the video analysis and crack montage production is done manually by an expert team of inspection engineers. In line with this process, bespoke image stitching software named “ASIST” (Automated Software Image Stitching Tool) has been trialled in the last 12 months and evaluated using data from: Dungeness, Hunterston B, Hinkley Point B, Heysham 1 and Torness outages. The software is now almost ready to replace the manual process and will provide higher quality images with 100% channel visualisation properties in a fraction of the time taken by the current approach. This paper provides a summary of the ASIST evaluation undertaken in the last year. It also describes recent research endeavours aiming to provide ASIST with: crack detection techniques; keyway locating algorithms and methods to compute Structure-from-Motion which will facilitate the extraction of 3D depth information directly from the 2D video footage