AUTHOR=Georgantzoglou Antonios , Merchant Michael J. , Jeynes Jonathan C. G. , Mayhead Natalie , Punia Natasha , Butler Rachel E. , Jena Rajesh TITLE=Applications of High-Throughput Clonogenic Survival Assays in High-LET Particle Microbeams JOURNAL=Frontiers in Oncology VOLUME=5 YEAR=2016 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/oncology/articles/10.3389/fonc.2015.00305 DOI=10.3389/fonc.2015.00305 ISSN=2234-943X ABSTRACT=
Charged particle therapy is increasingly becoming a valuable tool in cancer treatment, mainly due to the favorable interaction of particle radiation with matter. Its application is still limited due, in part, to lack of data regarding the radiosensitivity of certain cell lines to this radiation type, especially to high-linear energy transfer (LET) particles. From the earliest days of radiation biology, the clonogenic survival assay has been used to provide radiation response data. This method produces reliable data but it is not optimized for high-throughput microbeam studies with high-LET radiation where high levels of cell killing lead to a very low probability of maintaining cells’ clonogenic potential. A new method, therefore, is proposed in this paper, which could potentially allow these experiments to be conducted in a high-throughput fashion. Cells are seeded in special polypropylene dishes and bright-field illumination provides cell visualization. Digital images are obtained and cell detection is applied based on corner detection, generating individual cell targets as