A few months ago Catalysts has started the Thrombotherm project. This project is organized in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences OÖ and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute. The main goal of  the project is developing a method to analyze blood platelets by means of cell microscopy in real time and to classify them according to their activation state.

The software (software plugin) developed by Catalysts represents an enormous extension of the diagnostics. This helped us to bring the research of our partners to the market and in the field of diagnostics of thrombocytes a significant acceleration of the analysis.

The success of this project depends on the time necessary to process gathered information. This is why we were very careful in choosing the right framework fast enough to make algorithms real-time. Reading all reviews and recommendations (NVidia etc.) we have decided to use ArrayFire. So far we are very satisfied with its performance.

Our project has three main parts:
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 	<li>Detect cell morphology in real-time</li>
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Thombotherm makes it possible to mathematically determine and categorize the cell boundaries by means of transmitted light microscopy. The software distinguishes between "fried-egg”-shaped cells and "spider”-shaped cells. This is used to assess the quality of blood platelets in the blink of an eye.

<a href="http://sandbox.arrayfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Fig1.png"><img class="alignnone wp-image-9404 size-large" src="http://sandbox.arrayfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Fig1-1024x869.png" alt="Fig1" width="742" height="630" /></a>
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 	<li>Real-time cluster analysis</li>
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By means of a fluorescence micrograph, Thrombotherm identifies cell clusters taking into account the diffraction phenomena that occur. This allows a quantitative real-time representation of the platelets in the present sample.

<a href="http://sandbox.arrayfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Fig2.png"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-9407" src="http://sandbox.arrayfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Fig2-1024x869.png" alt="Fig2" width="742" height="630" /></a>
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 	<li>Real-time analysis of the mobility of receptors</li>
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Thrombotherm actually does not only analyse single images but also real-time image sequences. This allows following single molecules and their motion traces. Pixel resolution would not be sufficiently accurate in this case, so in order to receive exact values we are calculating with a point spread model. For doing a complex model calculation on the real-time image sequences preformant library- like ArrayFire- is invaluable.

[video width="2000" height="700" mp4="http://sandbox.arrayfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Thrombos_epoxy_blog_vid.mp4"][/video]

<em>Complex calculation of moving images in real time enabled with ArrayFire</em>

With the help of this completely new method of analyzing thrombocytes, laboratories can identify the mobility of cells, the compression of surface area markers, the morphology of cells and their activation condition in real time, all by using their existing hardware!