Fast quantification of immunohistochemistry tissue microarrays in lung carcinoma

Tissue microarrays (TMAs) are an effective tool for high-throughput molecular analysis of tissues to help identify new diagnostic and prognostic markers and targets in human cancers. We have developed a fully automated method for rapid, continuous and quantitative analysis of TMAs based on immunohistochemistry. The method deals with complex and varying tissue architectures, segments tumour cells from normal cells, conducts cell compartmentalisation, identifies nuclei and cytoplasm and produces three different continuous measurements of marker expression levels within tumour cell nuclei, tumour cell cytoplasm and total tumour cell protein expression. We have demonstrated this method using three independent protein markers (BAK, BAX and a novel biomarker, named KS) over 7 TMAs, involving 2 BAK stained TMAs with 229 tumour tissue cores, 2 BAX stained TMAs with 229 tumour tissue cores and 3 KS stained TMAs with 373 tumour cores of lung carcinomas. We validated the automated method, showing that the automated scoring is significantly correlated with the pathologist-based scoring.