Im, H. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2018

Bead Enhancement of EV Analysis

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are recognized cancer biomarkers, however, clinical analysis has been difficult due to a lack of simple and sensitive assays. Here, we describe a bead-enhanced flow cytometry method, BEAD flow, using biotinylated EVs captured on streptavidin particles. With this method, we show analysis of patient-derived EVs using a panel of pancreatic cancer biomarkers. BEAD flow is easily translatable to any biomarker or cancer type and can be run with conventional flow cytometers, making it highly flexible and adaptable to diverse research and clinical needs.

cancer biology↗

bioRxiv2017

Deep-learning based hologram classification for molecular diagnostics

Lens-free digital in-line holography (LDIH) is a promising microscopic tool that overcomes several drawbacks (e.g., limited field of view) of traditional lens-based microcopy. However, extensive computation is required to reconstruct object images from the complex diffraction patterns produced by LDIH, which limits LDIH utility for point-of-care applications, particularly in resource limited settings. Here, we describe a deep transfer learning (DTL) based approach to process LDIH images in the context of cellular analyses. Specifically, we captured holograms of cells labeled with molecular-specific microbeads and trained neural networks to classify these holograms without reconstruction. Using raw holograms as input, the trained networks were able to classify individual cells according to the number of cell-bound microbeads. The DTL-based approach including a VGG19 pretrained network showed robust performance even with noisy experimental data. Combined with the developed DTL approach, LDIH could be realized as a low-cost, portable tool for point-of-care diagnostics.

bioengineering↗