For example, for the above clinical examples, these observations were evident in anatomical, molecular, and/or functional imaging methods in vivo. In addition, tumor morphology in standard H&E stained tissue specimens may reflect the sum of all molecular pathways in tumor cells. It is therefore possible to postulate that by extracting quantitative disease-specific information across different scales of image data, different imaging phenotypes can be identified via association for different organ sites. To exploit this potential, efforts have already been directed to using data

presented in TCGA and TCIA. The information-rich content of both multiplex -omics LY2109761 mw platform assay datasets and modern digital images along with the accompanying complexity of metadata and annotations, however, poses new challenges for computational methods. Thus, increasingly sophisticated computational methods and archival storage capabilities to make the data accessible Selleck p38 MAPK inhibitor and interpretable for the desired clinical context is necessary. A wide range of new computational methods are available for image analysis methods and data integration strategies in the published computer science and image processing

literature, which will not be reviewed here in the interest of space [56]. They include texture analysis methods, multi-resolution feature extraction methods such as wavelets, feature reduction methods, a range of statistical classifiers including semi-supervised and unsupervised clustering methods with the ability to differentiate tissues within the tumor bed, and modeling methods that address tumor heterogeneity. Finally, a number

of statistical methods for performance assessment of these methods have been reported. Perhaps the more important barrier to implementation of advanced computational image analysis methods is the critical need for annotated data across different resolution scales, as required to optimize and validate the performance of these different software tools and final clinical decision support systems. While image or molecular datasets are widely available (e.g., TCGA, TCIA, and other database resources [57], [58], [59], [60] and [61]), only a few of these datasets exist in a structured, Amisulpride deeply annotated form. For example, while the shape of breast lesions in image scan help distinguish between benign and malignant lesions, to quantitatively assess lesion shape and type (e.g. via angularity or spicularity), segmentation of the lesion boundary is required. Progressing to using a wider range of features, including features extracted across different modalities, will clearly require a much higher level of deep annotation across different resolution scales invariably absent in most publicly available datasets. A further complication is that annotation is intrinsically specific to the scale of data being interrogated.