Tell us a bit more about your Innovation
Before I tell you about the innovation, I'll give you some context. Say, a new drug is being created to treat a certain condition. In the preliminary stages of drug testing, studying drug interaction on a cellular level is a crucial aspect. This is done through cell culture monitoring. The traditional process of cell culture monitoring requires a lot of human intervention, which can lead to cell damage. In addition, continuous cell monitoring over a sequence of time is not possible.
What I and my colleague did is create a machine vision algorithm to automate cell culture monitoring.
Input
Output of colony
What would be the potential impact of your project?
As I mentioned, in traditional approaches, cell damage is a possibility and clinical operators need to manually intervene to record cell behavior. Our solution provides an efficient non-invasive cell colony observation application and includes cell colony segmentation and its behavior (i.e., a healthy or unhealthy cell colony) recognition in a set of time series videos.
Our approach will improve efficiency in cell quality analysis and minimize cell wastage. Pattern recognition combined with machine vision will speed up operational time and enables continuous monitoring, which is not possible in manual methods. The same approach can be used for other cell colony observations with slight algorithmic modifications.
Long story short, the study of cell behavior under different conditions can be made much more effective and efficient. To know more, you can download the whitepaper on this innovation here.
How did you come up with the idea?
I am from a medical imaging background so I had knowledge of how cell cultivation processes are carried out, how the data is collected and processed. I realized these processes require a lot of human intervention which can affect the quality of study results. I thought "Why can't we automate the process of monitoring using machine vision." That's how I came up with this idea- To help researchers in their clinical studies.
How did LTTS help you in your innovation journey?
I and my colleague presented this idea in our internal innovation challenge called TechExpressions. LTTS provided me with a platform to express my technical ideas. We won the innovation challenge and later filed a patent for this application. For an engineer, it really matters where you work. Does your organization support innovation? Does it mentor you to better your ideas? Does it provide you with the opportunity to learn something new to improve on your first cuts? In my case, all the answers are a Big Yes!
