Framework for parsing, visualizing and scoring tissue microarray images

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

  • Andrew Rabinovich
  • Stan Krajewski
  • Maryla Krajewska
  • Ahmed Shabaik
  • Stephen M. Hewitt
  • Belongie, Serge
  • John C. Reed
  • Jeffrey H. Price

Increasingly automated techniques for arraying, immunostaining, and imaging tissue sections led us to design software for convenient management, display, and scoring. Demand for molecular marker data derived in situ from tissue has driven histology informatics automation to the point where one can envision the computer, rather than the microscope, as the primary viewing platform for histopathological scoring and diagnoses. Tissue microarrays (TMAs), with hundreds or even thousands of patients' tissue sections on each slide, were the first step in this wave of automation. Via TMAs, increasingly rapid identification of the molecular patterns of cancer that define distinct clinical outcome groups among patients has become possible. TMAs have moved the bottleneck of acquiring molecular pattern information away from sampling and processing the tissues to the tasks of scoring and results analyses. The need to read large numbers of new slides, primarily for research purposes, is driving continuing advances in commercially available automated microscopy instruments that already do or soon will automatically image hundreds of slides per day. We reviewed strategies for acquiring, collating, and storing histological images with the goal of streamlining subsequent data analyses. As a result of this work, we report an implementation of software for automated preprocessing, organization, storage, and display of high resolution composite TMA images.

Original languageEnglish
JournalIEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine
Volume10
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)209-219
Number of pages11
ISSN1089-7771
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2006
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Manuscript received July 8, 2004; revised March 23, 2005. This work was supported by the WPC Research and Education Fund, the UCSD Chancellor’s Scholarship, and the Chris and Warren Hellman Foundation. The high throughput microscopy instrumentation was funded by Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Engineering Research Grants, National Institutes of Health NICHD Grant HD37782, and NSF Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Grant BES-9871365. Disclosure statement: J. H. Price co-founded two companies: Q3DM Inc., now owned by Beckman Coulter; and Vala Sciences Inc.

    Research areas

  • Automated tissue microarray (TMA) scoring, Densitometry/flourometry, Image acquisition, Texture segmentation, Tissue microarrays(TMAs)

ID: 302054249