Automatic Segmentation of Multicellular Tumour Spheroids Images During Growing.

Image segmentation is an important topic in medical image processing. Multicellular tumour spheroids (MTS) are currently one of the most widely employed in vitro model for pre-clinical drug screening in cancer research. Assessing their growing requires the segmentation of images acquired at several time points.

Harnessing cells to improve transport of nanomedicines.

Efficient tumour treatment is hampered by the poor selectivity of anticancer drugs, resulting in scarce tumour accumulation and undesired off-target effects. Nano-sized drug-delivery systems in the form of nanoparticles (NPs) have been proposed to improve drug distribution to solid tumours, by virtue of their ability of passive and active tumour targeting. Despite these advantages, literature studies indicated that less than 1% of the administered NPs can successfully reach the tumour mass, highlighting the necessity for more efficient drug transporters in cancer treatment.