The mechanosensory system of teeth is currently believed to partly rely on Odontoblast cells stimulation by fluid flow through a porosity network extending through dentin. Visualizing the smallest sub-microscopic porosity vessels therefore requires the highest achievable resolution from confocal fluorescence microscopy, the current gold standard. This considerably limits the extent of the field of view to very small sample regions. To overcome this limitation, we tested different deep learning (DL) super-resolution (SR) models to allow faster experimental acquisitions of lower resolution images and restore optimal image quality by post-processing. Three supervised 2D SR models (RCAN, pix2pix, FSRCNN) and one unsupervised (CycleGAN) were applied to a unique set of experimentally paired high- and low-resolution confocal images acquired with different sampling schemes, resulting in a pixel size increase of x2, x4, x8. Model performance was quantified using a broad set of similarity and distribution-based image quality assessment (IQA) metrics, which yielded inconsistent results that mostly contradicted our visual perception. This raises the question of the relevance of such generic metrics to efficiently target the specific structure of dental porosity. To resolve this conflicting information, the generated SR images were segmented taking into account the specific scales and morphology of the porosity network and analysed by comparing connected components. Additionally, the capacity of the SR models to preserve 3D porosity connectivity throughout the confocal image stacks was evaluated using graph analysis. This biology-driven assessment allowed a far better mechanistic interpretation of SR performance, highlighting differences in model sensitivity to weak intensity features and the impact of non-linearity in image generation, which explains the failure of standard IQA metrics.

Microrobots engineered from self-propelling active particles, extend the reach of robotic operations to submillimeter dimensions and are becoming increasingly relevant for various tasks, such as manipulation of micro/nanoscale cargo, particularly targeted drug delivery. However, achieving deep-tissue penetration and drug delivery remain a challenge. This work developed a novel biohybrid microrobot consisting of jellyfish stinging capsules, which act as natural nanoinjectors for efficient penetration and delivery, assembled onto an active Janus particle (JP). While microrobot transport and navigation was externally controlled by magnetic field-induced rolling, capsule loading onto the JP surface was controlled by electric field. Following precise navigation of the biohybrid microrobots to the vicinity of target tissues, the capsules were activated by a specific enzyme introduced to the solution, which then triggered tubule ejection and release of the preloaded molecules. Use of such microrobots for penetration of and delivery of the preloaded drug/toxin to targeted cancer spheroids and live Caenorhabditis elegans was demonstrated in-vitro. The findings offer insights for future development of bio-inspired microrobots capable of deep penetration and drug delivery. Future directions may involve encapsulation of various drugs within different capsule types for enhanced versatility. This study may also inspire in-vivo applications involving deep tissue drug delivery.

Scientists have announced that they have grown artificial testicles in a dish, a development that they claim could help treat infertility in men. These lab-grown testicles are not yet fully functioning, sperm-producing organs, but they do share many of the same structures and genetic characteristics as natural ones. This will allow scientists to investigate fertility problems in men and possibly treat them by producing artificial sperm. Additionally, the scientist who led the work told DailyMail.com Increasingly, research has suggested that environmental pollutants in everything from food to children's toys impact male fertility, and many believe the rise of these chemicals is partly fueling America's fertility problem.

The discovery of patterns associated with diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy response in digital pathology images often requires intractable labeling of large quantities of histological objects. Here we release an open-source labeling tool, PatchSorter, which integrates deep learning with an intuitive web interface. Using >100,000 objects, we demonstrate a >7x improvement in labels per second over unaided labeling, with minimal impact on labeling accuracy, thus enabling high-throughput labeling of large datasets. While current hardware and machine learning algorithms can locate and type objects at scale, the manual assignment and review of large labeled datasets used to train or validate models remains arduous. For example, a single WSI may contain over 1 million cells, which, if requiring a modest 1 second per cell to label, would result in approximately 12 non-stop days of effort. To aid experts (e.g., pathologists) in this labeling process, several image analysis algorithms have been proposed PS is a user-friendly, browser-based tool, which allows the user to leverage deep learning (DL) to quickly review and apply labels at a group, as opposed to a single object, level (Figure 1).

There is growing concern that male reproduction is affected by environmental chemicals. One way to determine the adverse effect of environmental pollutants is to use wild animals as monitors and evaluate testicular toxicity using histopathology. Automated methods are necessary tools in the quantitative assessment of histopathology to overcome the subjectivity of manual evaluation and accelerate the process. We propose an automated method to process histology images of testicular tissue. Segmenting the epithelial layer of the seminiferous tubule is a prerequisite for developing automated methods to detect abnormalities in tissue. We suggest an encoder-decoder fully connected convolutional neural network (F-CNN) model to segment the epithelial layer of the seminiferous tubules in histological images. Using ResNet-34 modules in the encoder adds a shortcut mechanism to avoid the gradient vanishing and accelerate the network convergence. The squeeze & excitation (SE) attention block is integrated into the encoding module improving the segmentation and localization of epithelium. We applied the proposed method for the 2-class problem where the epithelial layer of the tubule is the target class. The f-score and IoU of the proposed method are 0.85 and 0.92. Although the proposed method is trained on a limited training set, it performs well on an independent dataset and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The pretrained ResNet-34 in the encoder and attention block suggested in the decoder result in better segmentation and generalization. The proposed method can be applied to testicular tissue images from any mammalian species and can be used as the first part of a fully automated testicular tissue processing pipeline. The dataset and codes are publicly available on GitHub.

Pathologists often classify various kidney diseases on the basis of visual assessments of biopsies from patients' kidneys; however, machine learning has the potential to automate and augment the accuracy of classifications. In one study, a team led by Pinaki Sarder, PhD and Brandon Ginley, BS (Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo) developed a computational algorithm to detect the severity of diabetic kidney disease without human intervention. The algorithm examines a digital image of a patient's kidney biopsy at the microscopic level and extracts information on glomeruli, the small blood vessels of the kidney that filter waste from the blood for excretion. These structures are known to become progressively damaged and scarred over the course of diabetes. There are typically 10 to 20 individual glomeruli per biopsy, and the algorithm detects the location of each glomerular sub-component in the digital images, and then makes many measurements on each sub-component.