Cellular response to directed energy—Soft Materials Mechanics Lab uses AI to study brain injury at the microscale

Among several causes of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), a potential threat is directed high-power pulsed radiofrequency/microwave energy exposure. To study this form of TBI, researchers aim to investigate how brain cells react to such energetic loads — but, before that, they must correctly identify them from micrographs.

The Soft Materials Mechanics Lab, in collaboration with the Franck Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are building a framework that will allow high-throughout investigations into the effects of high-powered directed energy-related TBI in different brain cell types. This project is funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) through the PANTHER program.

https://www.panther.engr.wisc.edu/

The PANTHER program, a global leader in physics-based traumatic brain injury detection and prevention

The Primary Obstacle: Identifying Individual Brain Cells Efficiently and Accurately

The brain is a complex organ, composed of multiple types of cells heterogeneously distributed. Different cells react differently to external loading, making it important to distinguish the cell types in any in vitro brain injury experiment focusing on the cellular scale. There are experiments where images of brain cells are taken and analyzed manually to identify them. However, these methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to low accuracy. There is an urgent need for a tool that can use a single confocal micrograph of a neural cell culture, and automatically provide a composite image identifying individual cell types.

AI generated depiction of accurately identified brain cells of a single type

Images from experiments containing all cells together

Goal: Build a Framework that enables investigation of Brain Cell Mechanics

The primary objective of the proposed project is to develop an AI-based framework for rapidly identifying different neural cell types from 3D confocal micrographs based on a single, non-specific cell marker (showing all cells simultaneously). Further, the framework will also allow the study of the thermomechanical behavior of brain cells under directed energy loading. This will allow further research on cellular-level TBI and open doors on ways to prevent and treat them.

The Team:

This project is led by Dr. Kshitiz Upadhyay, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at LSU. The development of the AI framework will be supported by in vitro neural cell experiments conducted in Dr. Christian Franck's lab at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.