SISTEMA DE CONTEO AUTOMÁTICO DE COLONIAS DE CÉLULAS TUMORALES

Radiobiology, which studies the effect of radiation-matter interaction in biological systems, is a fundamental area for the optimization of cancer treatment by radiotherapy. One of the most commonly used techniques in radiobiology is clonogenic (or colony formation) assays, which seek to measure the loss in cell division capacity in a tumour cell after it has been treated with ionising radiation. The analysis of the data obtained by this technique requires counting the colonies formed from hundreds of initially irradiated and cultured cells. Although there are some automatic colony counting systems, they are generally very expensive and/or only partially automatic. For this reason, in most cases the counting is done manually, making it a tedious and imprecise process. To solve this problem, radiobiologists, engineers and students of biomedical engineering and medicine from three universities came together to develop a strategy to facilitate the collection of data from cloned trials. This paper presents a new automatic method for counting colonies from clonogenic trials, based on image processing techniques. The results obtained with the automatic system were compared with manual counts to verify the quality and precision of the proposed method. With this new technique, it is expected to contribute to the development of practical solutions in the radiobiological field, which help to improve the obtaining of experimental data leading to propose solutions, from the laboratory, to health problems in the area of radio-oncology.