A deep conical agarose microwell array for adhesion independent three-dimensional cell culture and dynamic volume measurement.

Multicellular spheroids represent a well-established 3D model to study healthy and diseased cells in vitro. The use of conventional 3D cell culture platforms for the generation of multicellular spheroids is limited to cell types that easily self-assemble into spheroids because less adhesive cells fail to form stable aggregates. A high-precision micromoulding technique developed in our laboratory produces deep conical agarose microwell arrays that allow the cultivation of uniform multicellular aggregates, irrespective of the spheroid formation capacity of the cells.

Single punch, double biopsy.

Objective: In lethal primary metastatic prostate cancer, biopsy material is often the only accessible cancer tissue. Lack of tissue quantity limited the use of biopsy cores for analyzing higher numbers of molecular markers and standard histopathologic evaluation for clinical diagnosis simultaneously. Recent advances in single cell analytics have paved the way to characterize a tumor in more depth from minute input material such as biopsies.

Feasibility of a semi-automated contrast-oriented algorithm for tumor segmentation in retrospectively gated PET images: phantom and clinical validation.

PET/CT plays an important role in radiotherapy planning for lung tumors. Several segmentation algorithms have been proposed for PET tumor segmentation. However, most of them do not take into account respiratory motion and are not well validated.

[In-phantom dosimetric measurements as quality control for brachytherapy: System check and constancy check].

In brachytherapy dosimetric measurements are difficult due to the inherent dose-inhomogenieties. Typically in routine clincal practice only the nominal dose rate is determined for computer controlled afterloading systems. The region of interest lies close to the source when measuring the spatial dose distribution.

Improving MRT image quality in patients with movement disorders.

Objective: In order to improve image quality in a simultaneous fMRI-EEG study with patients suffering from the involuntary movements typical for Huntington's disease, the aim was to develop a technique for immobilizing the heads of our patients inside an MRI head coil.

Methods: We modified a mask technique previously used for reliable repositioning in temporally fractionated radiotherapy. The mask was tested in three patients with Huntington's disease, acquiring structural and functional MR images with simultaneous EEG with and without the mask.