Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) www.ornl.gov managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science https://science.energy.go/oso, is helping St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital https://www.stjude.org understand and cure childhood diseases. ORNL is helping the scientists at the hospital deal with and mine the enormous amounts of data accumulated by the hospital received from powerful video microscopes.
To help St. Jude scientists mine the data, researchers at ORNL created custom algorithms that provide a deeper understanding of the images to quicken the pace of research. The research is taking place at St. Jude’s Department of Developmental Neurobiology in Memphis Tennessee.
Scientists use advanced microscopy to capture the details of nerve cell growth and migration in the brains of mice. ORNL researchers take the videos and use image processing, computational science, and machine learning to analyze the footage and create statistics to help St Jude in their research.
According to Dr. Shaun Gleason, Director of ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division, “There’s so much information that St. Jude has yet to quantify in their imaging datasets. However, St. Jude’s ability to now image at high resolution and to tag cellular structures of interest with different fluorescent proteins is constantly improving. As a result, St Jude researchers are generating more data with interesting content. This means that their need for automated analysis and high performance computing is also growing.”
Gleason said, “Looking to the future, we would like to continue doing what we are doing with St. Jude and even expand our relationship to help them solve some of their biggest challenges, while also assisting them as they build computational capabilities in-house.”