Astronomical algorithms for automated analysis of tissue protein expression in breast cancer.

Abstract:: Background: High-throughput evaluation of tissue biomarkers in oncology has been greatly accelerated by the widespread use of tissue microarrays (TMAs) and immunohistochemistry. Although TMAs have the potential to facilitate protein expression profiling on a scale to rival experiments of tumour transcriptomes, the bottleneck and imprecision of manually scoring TMAs has impeded progress. Methods: We report image analysis algorithms adapted from astronomy for the precise automated analysis of IHC in all subcellular compartments. The power of this technique is demonstrated using over 2000 breast tumours and comparing quantitative automated scores against manual assessment by pathologists. Results: All continuous automated scores showed good correlation with their corresponding ordinal manual scores. For oestrogen receptor (ER), the correlation was 0.82, P

Authors:: HR Ali, M Irwin, L Morris, S-J Dawson, FM Blows, E Provenzano, B Mahler-Araujo, PD Pharoah, NA Walton, JD Brenton, C Caldas

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