TY - JOUR
T1 - Miaquant, a novel system for automatic segmentation, measurement, and localization comparison of different biomarkers from serialized histological slices
AU - Casiraghi, Elena
AU - Cossa, Mara
AU - Huber, Veronica
AU - Tozzi, Matteo
AU - Rivoltini, Licia
AU - Villa, Antonello
AU - Vergani, Barbara
PY - 2017/11/2
Y1 - 2017/11/2
N2 - In the clinical practice, automatic image analysis methods quickly quantizing histological results by objective and replicable methods are getting more and more necessary and widespread. Despite several commercial software products are available for this task, they are very little flexible, and provided as black boxes without modifiable source code. To overcome the aforementioned problems, we employed the commonly used MATLAB platform to develop an automatic method, MIAQuant, for the analysis of histochemical and immunohistochemical images, stained with various methods and acquired by different tools. It automatically extracts and quantifies markers characterized by various colors and shapes; furthermore, it aligns contiguous tissue slices stained by different markers and overlaps them with differing colors for visual comparison of their localization. Application of MIAQuant for clinical research fields, such as oncology and cardiovascular disease studies, has proven its efficacy, robustness and flexibility with respect to various problems; we highlight that, the flexibility of MIAQuant makes it an important tool to be exploited for basic researches where needs are constantly changing. MIAQuant software and its user manual are freely available for clinical studies, pathological research, and diagnosis.
AB - In the clinical practice, automatic image analysis methods quickly quantizing histological results by objective and replicable methods are getting more and more necessary and widespread. Despite several commercial software products are available for this task, they are very little flexible, and provided as black boxes without modifiable source code. To overcome the aforementioned problems, we employed the commonly used MATLAB platform to develop an automatic method, MIAQuant, for the analysis of histochemical and immunohistochemical images, stained with various methods and acquired by different tools. It automatically extracts and quantifies markers characterized by various colors and shapes; furthermore, it aligns contiguous tissue slices stained by different markers and overlaps them with differing colors for visual comparison of their localization. Application of MIAQuant for clinical research fields, such as oncology and cardiovascular disease studies, has proven its efficacy, robustness and flexibility with respect to various problems; we highlight that, the flexibility of MIAQuant makes it an important tool to be exploited for basic researches where needs are constantly changing. MIAQuant software and its user manual are freely available for clinical studies, pathological research, and diagnosis.
KW - Artificial intelligence
KW - Digital image processing
KW - Histochemical and immunohistochemical image analysis
KW - Statistical analysis
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U2 - 10.4081/ejh.2017.2838
DO - 10.4081/ejh.2017.2838
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85036544923
VL - 61
SP - 270
EP - 275
JO - European Journal of Histochemistry
JF - European Journal of Histochemistry
SN - 1121-760X
IS - 4
M1 - 2838
ER -