Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Without question, the most important and extensive commercial application of cellular logic techniques is in biomedicine. The diff-series of cellular logic machines initially developed by Perkin-Elmer and currently under development, manufacture, and distribution by the Coulter Biomedical Research Corporation are employed worldwide. During periods of peak operation, these machines both screen and analyze the images of the red cells, white cells, and platelets of approximately 50,000 individuals daily. All employ the GLOPR cellular logic machine described in Chapter 10. At the time of writing, if these machines were in use simultaneously, they would be capable collectively of reviewing at low resolution the images of about 30 million red cells per hour, analyzing simultaneously 30,000 high-resolution white cell images, while also measuring platelet characteristics. This is the largest automatic image analysis effort anywhere in the world and exceeds by an order of magnitude the image sensing capability of LANDSAT.