Quantification of biological and medical analysis is a major concern nowadays in order to standardize and improve the efficiency and objectivity of the studies. Virtual microscopy in combination with sophisticated image analysis is a great opportunity here. The NanoZoomer has already proven its great potential on this fi­eld in many laboratories in the world.

Routine, research and pharmaceutical studies

Reliable quantification of the percentage of staining by the human eye & brain is known to be very difficult. While very low staining or high staining will be scored with low deviation among pathologists, scoring intermediate staining results in a high standard deviation and low accuracy. And practical considerations usually prohibit counting tasks on a whole-slide basis.

With virtual slides, you can now define accurate protocols and run efficient algorithms on whole slides or specified areas. Under the control of a pathologist, this is a powerful tool that makes scoring more accurate and achieves high throughput to increase statistical significance. This is currently of very high interest for instance for cancer biomarker expression quantification (Her2/Neu for example), and is frequently of importance for both patient health as well as financial considerations. In the research and pharmaceutical industries these methods become increasingly important in proportion to the number of markers, targets, and drugs to test. The embedding of source images, analysis parameters and analysis results in a common database from the beginning allows for powerful data handling including data mining, cross correlation studies, automatic report generation, and so on.

TMA analysis is one application where image analysis is badly needed. Special software solutions allow applying rapid batch analysis of all cores, much faster than humanly possible.

Applications

• Biomarker scoring
• Toxicology research
• Target identification/gene expression study
• Fluorescence
• TMA

Tools

• Morphometry
• Structure characterization and quantification (glomeruli, tubules, angiogenesis, follicules, etc.)
• Staining percentage quantification
• Necrosis, cellular characterization, hemorrhages
• Counting and characterization (nucleus, cells, mitosis, lymphocytes, etc.)
• Biomarkers identification and characterization (membrane, cytoplasm or nuclear markers)
• Pap test, etc.
• TMA analysis