Mechatronic system for ABO human blood typing

In medical emergency situations, when a patient needs a blood transfusion, the universal blood type O− is administered. This procedure may lead to the depletion of stock reserves of O− blood. Nowadays, there is no commercial equipment capable of determining the patient's blood type in situ, in a fast and reliable process. Human blood typing is usually performed through the manual test, which involves a macroscopic observation and interpretation of the results by an analyst. This test, despite of having a fast response time, may lead to human errors, which sometimes can be fatal to the patient. This paper presents the development of an automatic mechatronic prototype for determining human blood typing (ABO and Rh systems) through image processing techniques. The prototype design takes into account the characteristics of reliability of analysis, portability, and response time allowing the system to be used in emergency situations. The developed prototype performs blood and reagents mixture acquires the resultant image and processes the data (based on image processing techniques) to determine the sample blood type. It was tested in a laboratory, using cataloged samples of blood types, provided by the Portuguese Institute of Blood and Transplantation. Hereafter, it is expected to test and validate the prototype in clinical environments.

Automated image analysis of lung branching morphogenesis

Regulating mechanisms of branchingmorphogenesis of fetal lung rat explants have been an essential tool formolecular research.This work presents a new methodology to accurately quantify the epithelial, outer contour, and peripheral airway buds of lung explants during cellular development frommicroscopic images. Methods.Theouter contour was defined using an adaptive and multiscale threshold algorithm whose level was automatically calculated based on an entropy maximization criterion. The inner lung epithelium was defined by a clustering procedure that groups small image regions according to the minimum description length principle and local statistical properties. Finally, the number of peripheral buds was counted as the skeleton branched ends from a skeletonized image of the lung inner epithelia. Results. The time for lung branching morphometric analysis was reduced in 98% in contrast to themanualmethod. Best results were obtained in the first two days of cellular development, with lesser standard deviations. Nonsignificant differences were found between the automatic and manual results in all culture days. Conclusions. The proposed method introduces a series of advantages related to its intuitive use and accuracy, making the technique suitable to images with different lighting characteristics and allowing a reliable comparison between different researchers.