Cell-Based Micro/Nano-Robots for Biomedical Applications: A Review.

Micro/nano-robots are powerful tools for biomedical applications and are applied in disease diagnosis, tumor imaging, drug delivery, and targeted therapy. Among the various types of micro-robots, cell-based micro-robots exhibit unique properties because of their different cell sources. In combination with various actuation methods, particularly externally propelled methods, cell-based microrobots have enormous potential for biomedical applications. This review introduces recent progress and applications of cell-based micro/nano-robots. Different actuation methods for micro/nano-robots are summarized, and cell-based micro-robots with different cell templates are introduced. Furthermore, the review focuses on the combination of cell-based micro/nano-robots with precise control using different external fields. Potential challenges, further prospects, and clinical translations are also discussed.

Auto-CSC: A Transfer Learning Based Automatic Cell Segmentation and Count Framework.

Cell segmentation and counting play a very important role in the medical field. The diagnosis of many diseases relies heavily on the kind and number of cells in the blood. convolution neural network achieves encouraging results on image segmentation. However, this data-driven method requires a large number of annotations and can be a time-consuming and expensive process, prone to human error. In this paper, we present a novel frame to segment and count cells without too many manually annotated cell images. Before training, we generated the cell image labels on single-kind cell images using traditional algorithms. These images were then used to form the train set with the label. Different train sets composed of different kinds of cell images are presented to the segmentation model to update its parameters. Finally, the pretrained U-Net model is transferred to segment the mixed cell images using a small dataset of manually labeled mixed cell images. To better evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we design and train a new automatic cell segmentation and count framework. The test results and analyses show that the segmentation and count performance of the framework trained by the proposed method equal the model trained by large amounts of annotated mixed cell images.