Suppressing blooming interference in structured light systems by adaptively reducing camera oversaturated energy.

Structured light systems often suffer interference of the fringes by blooming when scanning metal objects. Unfortunately, this problem cannot be reliably solved using conventional methods such as the high dynamic range (HDR) method or adaptive projection technique. Therefore, this study proposes a method to adaptively suppress the oversaturated areas that cause blooming as the exposure time increases and then fuse the multi-exposure time decoding results using a decoding inheritance method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides a more effective suppression of blooming interference than existing methods.

Automated Bright Field Segmentation of Cells and Vacuoles Using Image Processing Technique.

Understanding the mechanisms and other variants of programmed cell death will help provide deeper insight into various disease processes. Although complex procedures are required to distinguish each type of cell death, the formation of vacuoles is one of the important features in some process of cell death under different conditions. Thus, monitoring and counting the number of vacuoles and the ratio of cells with vacuoles is a commonly used method to indicate and quantify the efficacy of the therapy. Several studies have shown that image processing can provide a quick, convenient and precise mean of performing cell detection. Hence, this study uses an image processing technique to detect and quantify vacuolated cells without the need for dyes. The system both counts the number of vacuolated cells and determines the ratio of cells with vacuoles. The performance of the proposed image processing system was evaluated using 38 images. It has been shown that a strong correlation exists between the automated counts and the manual counts. Furthermore, the absolute percentage errors between automated counts and manual counts for cell detection and vacuolated cell detection using data pooled from all images are 3.61 and 3.33%, respectively. A user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) is also developed and freely available for download, providing researchers in biomedicine with a more convenient instrument for vacuolization analysis.

Automated counting of bacterial colonies by image analysis.

Research on microorganisms often involves culturing as a means to determine the survival and proliferation of bacteria. The number of colonies in a culture is counted to calculate the concentration of bacteria in the original broth; however, manual counting can be time-consuming and imprecise. To save time and prevent inconsistencies, this study proposes a fully automated counting system using image processing methods. To accurately estimate the number of viable bacteria in a known volume of suspension, colonies distributing over the whole surface area of a plate, including the central and rim areas of a Petri dish are taken into account. The performance of the proposed system is compared with verified manual counts, as well as with two freely available counting software programs. Comparisons show that the proposed system is an effective method with excellent accuracy with mean value of absolute percentage error of 3.37%. A user-friendly graphical user interface is also developed and freely available for download, providing researchers in biomedicine with a more convenient instrument for the enumeration of bacterial colonies.

Numerical investigation into thermal effects of pre-cooling zone in vitrification-based cryopreservation process.

Most studies on ultra-fast cryopreservation assume an immediate placement of the cryopreservation tube in the liquid nitrogen tank. However, in practice, before the tube is placed into the liquid nitrogen, it passes through a space containing gaseous nitrogen (pre-cooling zone) formed via the evaporation of the bulk liquid nitrogen. Comparing with ultra-fast cryopreservation, the cooling rate is insufficiently high during the falling transition to vitrify the liquid. As the tube passes through this region, its temperature may fall to the temperature required for the formation of ice crystals, and thus cell damage may occur. Consequently, in optimizing the cryopreservation process, the effects of this transition region should be properly understood. Accordingly, the present study utilizes a thermal model to investigate the temperature variation in the tube as it falls through the pre-cooling region. The simulation results show that the cooling rate within the tube increases with an increasing tube velocity. Furthermore, the results reveal that the cooling rate at the front end of the tube is higher than that at any other position of the tube. Thus, to prevent the formation of ice crystals, the material used to seal the front end of the tube should have a low thermal conductivity. In addition, a streamlined design of the front end of the tube is advised. Finally, the cooling rate within the tube depends on the tube material as well as the falling speed. The height of the pre-cooling zone needs to be carefully designed based on the tube material and falling speed, thus the ice crystal formation can be prevented.