Biocompatible and electrically conductive porous scaffolds with a desirable hydrophilicity and degradation rate and suitable mechanical performance are highly favorable for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications. In this study, we fabricated three-dimensional (3D) porous bioscaffolds from poly(ε-caprolactone) and polylactic acid containing different concentrations of zirconia nanoparticles (n-ZrO 2 ) through freeze-drying technique. Afterward, the surface of the scaffolds was coated with an electrically conductive layer through in situ polymerization of polypyrrole (PPy) on the samples. Bioscaffolds exhibited a favorable range of mechanical properties and electrical conductivity, meeting the required mechanical performances and conductivity for a broad range of tissue engineering applications. Coating PPy on the scaffolds resulted in significantly higher hydrophilicity and faster biodegradation rate, as well as a noticeable enhancement on the in vitro cell attachment, proliferation, and viability. Our findings indicated that the simultaneous presence of n-ZrO 2 and PPy in the system presents a noticeable synergistic effect in overall properties and introduces the fabricated 3D porous scaffolds as promising candidates for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications.
Celiac Disease (CD) is an immune-mediated enteropathy, diagnosed in the clinical practice by intestinal biopsy and the concomitant presence of a positive celiac serology. Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy (CLE) allows skilled and trained experts to potentially perform in vivo virtual histology of small-bowel mucosa. In particular, it allows the qualitative evaluation of mucosa alteration such as a decrease in goblet cells density, presence of villous atrophy or crypt hypertrophy. We present a semi-automatic method for villi detection from confocal endoscopy images, whose appearance change in case of villous atrophy. Starting from a set of manual seeds, a first rough segmentation of the villi is obtained by means of mathematical morphology operations. A merge and split procedure is then performed, to ensure that each seed originates a different region in the final segmentation. A border refinement process is finally performed, evolving the shape of each region according to local gradient intensities. Mean and median Dice coefficients for 290 villi originating from 66 images when compared to manually obtained ground truth are 80.71% and 87.96% respectively.
Celiac Disease (CD) is an immune-mediated enteropathy, diagnosed in the clinical practice by intestinal biopsy and the concomitant presence of a positive celiac serology. Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy (CLE) allows skilled and trained experts to potentially perform in vivo virtual histology of small-bowel mucosa. In particular, it allows the qualitative evaluation of mucosa alteration such as a decrease in goblet cells density, presence of villous atrophy or crypt hypertrophy. We present a semi-automatic computer-based method for the detection of goblet cells from confocal endoscopy images, whose density changes in case of pathological tissue. After a manual selection of a suitable region of interest, the candidate columnar and goblet cells' centers are first detected and the cellular architecture is estimated from their position using a Voronoi diagram. The region within each Voronoi cell is then analyzed and classified as goblet cell or other. The results suggest that our method is able to detect and label goblet cells immersed in a columnar epithelium in a fast, reliable and automatic way. Accepting 0.44 false positives per image, we obtain a sensitivity value of 90.3%. Furthermore, estimated and real goblet cell densities are comparable (error: 9.7 ± 16.9%, correlation: 87.2%, R(2) = 76%).
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