Project Objectives

1. Elaboration of technical specifications for the experimental model, working protocols and documentation that are required for the next stages.

2. Creation of experimental blood samples enriched with CTC, by seeding tumor cells taken from cell cultures, for in vitro testing.

3. Development of a simple experimental device / assembling that generates images with CTC in vitro, for a preliminary testing of the image analysis software.

4. Development of the experimental device, which should be able to drawn venous blood, to aquire a sequence of dynamic images, to separate CTC from the blood flow at the system’s command and then, to re-inject the blood in the vein.

5. Software development for automatically images analysis based on advanced image processing and pattern recognition tools and for the automatic control of the separator switch.

6. System performance testing and validation by comparison with other traditional methods of CTC identification for both, experimentally blood enriched with tumor cells, and blood with CTC collected from patients with various metastatic cancers.