Research supervisor: Dr Julia Gala de Pablo

Project aims and objectives:

The aim of this project is to explore a new way of measuring the size and "squishiness/ rigidity" (deformability) of particles and cells as they flow in a fluid. Deformability is very important because it can reveal a lot about a cell's health, relating to a lot of diseases, but measuring it accurately and quickly is difficult. To tackle this, the project pairs: a microfluidic deformability cytometry setup, which channels cells through tubes thinner than a human hair, and an event-based, neuromorphic camera. Unlike an ordinary camera that captures full frames at fixed intervals, the event-based (or neuromorphic) camera only records changes in the pixel by flux, pixel by pixel, as they happen. This makes it extremely fast and efficient, but it also produces a unique sort of data - a continuous stream of events, measuring time, space and flux, rather than conventional images - which needs entirely new unique processing methods.

The objective is to 'fine-tune' this process, find which way of measuring the data gives back the 'best' results. To do this, the software will be designed and tampered with to optimise the camera's capture settings to ensure no waste data is generated/ determine what waste data is. The eventual goal of this project would be to prove the se camera's usefulness so much so that every hospital in the country has one of these cameras to both save lives, by delivering quicker and more accurate diagnoses and saving energy/costs on cameras that generate a lot of images and data that isn't needed.

Motivation: 

My main motivation for applying to this project is a genuine enthusiasm for research that solves issues in people's lives, no matter how small, and the chance to work on a problem that sits outside the boundaries of my own discipline. As a civil engineering student at the University of Leeds, much of my work has involved understanding how fluids behave and move, and I am keen to take that grounding in fluid mechanics in a new and unfamiliar direction. The idea that I can possibly contribute to the process of medical diagnoses in such a significant, positive way doesn't seem real to me with such cutting edge techonology. On top of this, applying my knowledge of fluids at the microscopic scale - to the way individual cells and particles flow and deform - is exactly the kind of challenge that excites me, precisely because it asks me to stretch my existing knowledge into territory I have not encountered before. I truly cannot wait to start on this project within the Laidlaw Foundation