Image quantification of high-throughput tissue microarray

摘要

Tissue microarray (TMA) technology allows rapid visualization of molecular targets in thousands of tissue specimens at a time and provides valuable information on expression of proteins within tissues at a cellular and sub-cellular level. TMA technology overcomes the bottleneck of traditional tissue analysis and allows it to catch up with the rapid advances in lead discovery. Studies using TMA on immunohistochemistry (IHC) can produce a large amount of images for interpretation within a very short time. Manual interpretation does not allow accurate quantitative analysis of staining to be undertaken. Automatic image capture and analysis has been shown to be superior to manual interpretation. The aims of this work is to develop a truly high-throughput and fully automated image capture and analysis system. We develop a robust colour segmentation algorithm using hue-saturation-intensiry (HSI) colour space to provide quantification of signal intensity and partitioning of staining on high-throughput TMA. Initial segmentation results and quantification data have been achieved on 16,000 TMA colour images over 23 different tissue types.