Dr. Daniele Pirone’s thesis entitled “Tomographic phase microscopy in flow cytometry” was awarded as the Best PhD Thesis 2023 in applied photonics by the IEEE Photonics Society Italy Chapter.
The thesis focuses on phase-contrast tomography in flow cytometry mode (TPM-FC) and has been developed in the laboratories of the Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems “E. Caianiello” (ISASI) as part of the PhD course in “Information and Communication Technology for Health” at the University of Naples “Federico II” (UNINA). By exploiting the potential of a label-free holographic microscope, the TPM-FC technique allows to reconstruct the 3D spatial distribution of the refractive indexes of cells while flowing in a microfluidic environment. In this PhD thesis, several computational strategies for the advanced single-cell analysis have been developed to transform into a concrete technology the original proof of concept of TPM-FC conceived at ISASI. In particular, the lack of intracellular specificity due to the absence of dyes was filled for some organelles and artificial intelligence models were trained for the phenotyping of tumor cells and the recognition of drug resistance. In the future, the achieved results could help to provide a solution to the challenging issue of liquid biopsy, which aims at the early tumor diagnosis and the development of personalized therapies via non-invasive blood tests. Daniele Pirone is currently a post-doc researcher at ISASI. The results reported in his PhD thesis were developed under the supervision of Dr. Pasquale Memmolo and Dr. Pietro Ferraro at ISASI, in collaboration with Prof. Angelo Liseno (tutor), Prof. Claudio Curcio (co-tutor), and Prof. Amedeo Capozzoli (co-tutor) of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology (DIETI) at UNINA.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-022-01096-7
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/lc/d1lc01087e