High throughput detection and characterization of red blood cells deformability by combining optical tweezers with microfluidic technique / 生物医学工程学杂志

A high throughput measurement method of human red blood cells (RBCs) deformability combined with optical tweezers technology and the microfluidic chip was proposed to accurately characterize the deformability of RBCs statistically. Firstly, the effective stretching deformation of RBCs was realized by the interaction of photo-trapping force and fluid viscous resistance. Secondly, the characteristic parameters before and after the deformation of the single cell were extracted through the image processing method to obtain the deformation index of area and circumference. Finally, statistical analysis was performed, and the average deformation index parameters (

Real-time measurement of cell contractile force during activation of human hepatic stellate cell line LX-2 / 生物医学工程学杂志

The contractile force of hepatic stellate cells plays a very important role in liver damage, hepatitis and fibrosis. In this paper, a method based on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) thin micropillar arrays is proposed to measure the contractile force of human hepatic stellate cell line LX-2, which enables dynamic measurement of the subcellular distribution of force magnitude and direction. First, thin micropillar arrays on glass bottom dish were fabricated using two-step casting process in order to meet the working distance requirement of 100× objective lens. After hydrophilic treatment and protein imprint, cells were seeded on the micropillar arrays. LX-2 cells, which were quiesced by growth in serum-free medium, were activated by adding fetal bovine serum (FBS). The deflections of the micropillars were achieved by image processing technique, and then the contractile force of cells exerted on the micropillars was calculated according to mechanical simulation results, and was analyzed under both quiescent and activated conditions. The experimental results show that the average traction force of quiescent cells is about 20 nN, while the contractile force of activated cells increased to 110 nN upon adding FBS. This method can quantify the contractile force of LX-2 cell on subcellular scale in both quiescent and activated states, which may benefit pathology study and drug screen for chronic liver diseases resulted from liver fibrosis.

Automatic clustering method of flow cytometry data based on -distributed stochastic neighbor embedding / 生物医学工程学杂志

The traditional method of multi-parameter flow data clustering in flow cytometry is to mainly use professional software to manually set the door and circle out the target cells for analysis. The analysis process is complex and professional. Based on this, a clustering algorithm, which is based on -distributed stochastic neighbor embedding ( -SNE) algorithm for multi-parameter stream data, is proposed in the paper. In this algorithm, the Euclidean distance of sample data in high dimensional space is transformed into conditional probability to represent similarity, and the data is reduced to low dimensional space. In this paper, the stained human peripheral blood cells were treated by flow cytometry, and the processed data were derived as experimental sample data. The -SNE algorithm is compared with the kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) dimensionality reduction algorithm, and the main component data obtained by the dimensionality reduction are classified using -means algorithm. The results show that the -SNE algorithm has a good clustering effect on the cell population with asymmetric and trailing distribution, and the clustering accuracy can reach 92.55%, which may be helpful for automatic analysis of multi-color multi-parameter flow data.