Cancer remains the leading cause of death worldwide despite the enormous efforts that are made in the development of cancer biology and anticancer therapeutic treatment. Furthermore, recent studies in oncology have focused on the complex cancer metastatic process as metastatic disease contributes to more than 90% of tumor‐related death. In the metastatic process, isolation and analysis of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) play a vital role in diagnosis and prognosis of cancer patients at an early stage. To obtain relevant information on cancer metastasis and progression from CTCs, reliable approaches are required for CTC detection and isolation. Additionally, experimental platforms mimicking the tumor microenvironment in vitro give a better understanding of the metastatic microenvironment and antimetastatic drugs' screening. With the advancement of microfabrication and rapid prototyping, microfluidic techniques are now increasingly being exploited to study cancer metastasis as they allow precise control of fluids in small volume and rapid sample processing at relatively low cost and with high sensitivity. Recent advancements in microfluidic platforms utilized in various methods for CTCs' isolation and tumor models recapitulating the metastatic microenvironment (tumor‐on‐a‐chip) are comprehensively reviewed. Future perspectives on microfluidics for cancer metastasis are proposed.
Non-destructive-testing (NDT), including active thermography, has become an inevitable part of composite process and product verification, post-manufacturing. However, there is no reliable NDT technique available to ensure the interlaminar bond integrity during composite laminates integration, bonding or repair where the presence of thin airgaps in the interface of dissimilar polymer composite materials would be detrimental to structural integrity. This paper introduces a novel approach attempting to quantify the damage thickness of composites (the thickness of air gaps inside composites) through a single-side inspection of pulsed thermography. The potential of this method is demonstrated by testing on three specimens with different types of defect, where the Pearson Correlation Coefficients of the thickness estimation for block defects and flatbottom holes are 0.75 and 0.85, respectively. This approach will considerably enhance the degradation assessment performance of active thermography by extending damage measurement from currently two dimensions to three dimensions, and become an enabling technology on quality assurance of structural integrity.
The measurement accuracy and reliability of thermography is largely limited by a relatively low spatial resolution of the thermal imager. Using a high-end camera to achieve high spatial resolution can be costly or infeasible due to a high sample rate required. Furthermore, the system miniaturisation becomes an inevitable trend with the continuous development of Internet of Things and their suitability to in-situ inspection scenarios. However, a miniaturised sensor usually suffers a low spatial resolution. Addressing this challenge, the paper reports a novel Spatial Resolution Enhancement for a Thermogram (SRE4T) system to significantly improve the spatial resolution without upgrading the sensor. A high-resolution thermal image is reconstructed by fusing a sequence of lowresolution images with sub-pixel movements. To achieve the best image quality, instead of benefiting from natural movements of existing studies, this paper proposes to use a high-resolution xy translation stage to produce a sequence of controlled sub-pixel movements. The performance of the proposed system was tested on both high-end and low-end thermal imagers. Both visual and quantitative results successfully demonstrated the considerable improvement of the quality of thermal images (up to 30.5% improvement of peak signal to noise ratio). This technique allows improving the measurement accuracy of thermography inspection without upgrading sensors. It also has the potential to be applied on other imaging systems.
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