Histological imaging is essential for the biomedical research and clinical diagnosis of human cancer. Although optical microscopy provides a standard method, it is a persistent goal to develop new imaging methods for more precise histological examination. Here, we use nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond as quantum sensors and demonstrate micrometer-resolution immunomagnetic microscopy (IMM) for human tumor tissues. We immunomagnetically labeled cancer biomarkers in tumor tissues with magnetic nanoparticles and imaged them in a 400-nm resolution diamond-based magnetic microscope. There is barely magnetic background in tissues, and the IMM can resist the impact of a light background. The distribution of biomarkers in the high-contrast magnetic images was reconstructed as that of the magnetic moment of magnetic nanoparticles by employing deep-learning algorithms. In the reconstructed magnetic images, the expression intensity of the biomarkers was quantified with the absolute magnetic signal. The IMM has excellent signal stability, and the magnetic signal in our samples had not changed after more than 1.5 y under ambient conditions. Furthermore, we realized multimodal imaging of tumor tissues by combining IMM with hematoxylin-eosin staining, immunohistochemistry, or immunofluorescence microscopy in the same tissue section. Overall, our study provides a different histological method for both molecular mechanism research and accurate diagnosis of human cancer.

No abstract

Totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (namely, TASEP) is one of the most vital driven diffusive systems, which depicts stochastic dynamics of self-driven particles unidirectional updating along one-dimensional discrete lattices controlled by hard-core exclusions. Different with pre-existing results, driven diffusive system composed by multiple TASEPs with asymmetric heterogeneous interactions under two-dimensional periodic boundaries is investigated. By using detailed balance principle, particle configurations are extensively studied to obtain universal laws of characteristic order parameters of such stochastic dynamic system. By performing analytical analyses and Monte-Carlo simulations, local densities are found to be monotone increase with global density and spatially homogeneous to site locations. Oppositely, local currents are found to be non-monotonically increasing against global density and proportional to forward rate. Additionally, by calculating different cases of topologies, changing transition rates are found to have greater effects on particle configurations in adjacent subsystems. By intuitively comparing with pre-existing results, the improvement of our work also shows that introducing and considering totally heterogeneous interactions can improve the total current in such multiple TASEPs and optimize the overall transport of such driven-diffusive system. Our research will be helpful to understand microscopic dynamics and non-equilibrium dynamical behaviors of interacting particle systems.

No abstract