Leonie Zeune


PostDoc

E-mail: l.l.zeune@utwente.nl
Telephone: +31 53 489 4417
Fax: +31 53 489 3511
Address: Faculty of Science and Technology
Medical Cell BioPhysics (MCBP)
Building: Zilverling
Room: Z3006

Drienerlolaan 5
P.O. Box 217
7500 AE Enschede
The Netherlands

Project goals

The EU IMI CANCER-ID project aims to validate technologies for Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs), circulating free DNA (cfDNA) and circulating cell free microRNAs (cfmiRs) as blood-based biomarkers to determine the absence or presence of drug targets and to assess response to treatment. Within this project, we aim to develop an automatic detection and classification algorithm for CTCs in blood probes using mathematical image analysis.

Project Background

Before CTCs can be established as a routine liquid biopsy in the clinic to guide therapy of cancer patients they will need to be present and isolated in sufficient numbers and their content readily accessible to determine whether certain therapies can be effective or not. An important consideration hereby is the lack of a unified approach to designate a cell as a CTC, in particular when different technology platforms are used.

Development of an Automatic Detection and Classification algorithm for CTCs

The strong need for a unified, robust and automatic CTC definition will be addressed by the development of an Open Source CTC scoring algorithm. Microscopy images from different platforms can then be analyzed using the algorithm and, as a result, CTC candidates are presented to a reviewer. The main components of the algorithm are image normalization, segmentation and cell classification. To address these problems, our research focuses on variational methods in the field of mathematical image processing and inverse problems with biomedical applications.

Collaboration

This project is a collaboration with the Applied Analysis (AA) group at the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Twente.