Subcellular protein expression models for microsatellite instability in colorectal adenocarcinoma tissue images.

BACKGROUND: New bioimaging techniques capable of visualising the co-location of numerous proteins within individual cells have been proposed to study tumour heterogeneity of neighbouring cells within the same tissue specimen. These techniques have highlighted the need to better understand the interplay between proteins in terms of their colocalisation. RESULTS: We recently proposed a cellular-level model of the healthy and cancerous colonic crypt microenvironments. Here, we extend the model to include detailed models of protein expression to generate synthetic multiplex fluorescence data. As a first step, we present models for various cell organelles learned from real immunofluorescence data from the Human Protein Atlas. Comparison between the distribution of various features obtained from the real and synthetic organelles has shown very good agreement. This has included both features that have been used as part of the model input and ones that have not been explicitly considered. We then develop models for six proteins which are important colorectal cancer biomarkers and are associated with microsatellite instability, namely MLH1, PMS2, MSH2, MSH6, P53 and PTEN. The protein models include their complex expression patterns and which cell phenotypes express them. The models have been validated by comparing distributions of real and synthesised parameters and by application of frameworks for analysing multiplex immunofluorescence image data. CONCLUSIONS: The six proteins have been chosen as a case study to illustrate how the model can be used to generate synthetic multiplex immunofluorescence data. Further proteins could be included within the model in a similar manner to enable the study of a larger set of proteins of interest and their interactions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model for expression of multiple proteins in anatomically intact tissue, rather than within cells in culture.

A model of the spatial tumour heterogeneity in colorectal adenocarcinoma tissue.

BACKGROUND: There have been great advancements in the field of digital pathology. The surge in development of analytical methods for such data makes it crucial to develop benchmark synthetic datasets for objectively validating and comparing these methods. In addition, developing a spatial model of the tumour microenvironment can aid our understanding of the underpinning laws of tumour heterogeneity. RESULTS: We propose a model of the healthy and cancerous colonic crypt microenvironment. Our model is designed to generate synthetic histology image data with parameters that allow control over cancer grade, cellularity, cell overlap ratio, image resolution, and objective level. CONCLUSIONS: To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first model to simulate histology image data at sub-cellular level for healthy and cancerous colon tissue, where the cells have different compartments and are organised to mimic the microenvironment of tissue in situ rather than dispersed cells in a cultured environment. Qualitative and quantitative validation has been performed on the model results demonstrating good similarity to the real data. The simulated data could be used to validate techniques such as image restoration, cell and crypt segmentation, and cancer grading.

DiSWOP: a novel measure for cell-level protein network analysis in localized proteomics image data.

MOTIVATION: New bioimaging techniques have recently been proposed to visualize the colocation or interaction of several proteins within individual cells, displaying the heterogeneity of neighbouring cells within the same tissue specimen. Such techniques could hold the key to understanding complex biological systems such as the protein interactions involved in cancer. However, there is a need for new algorithmic approaches that analyze the large amounts of multi-tag bioimage data from cancerous and normal tissue specimens to begin to infer protein networks and unravel the cellular heterogeneity at a molecular level. RESULTS: The proposed approach analyzes cell phenotypes in normal and cancerous colon tissue imaged using the robotically controlled Toponome Imaging System microscope. It involves segmenting the 4',6-diamidino-2-phenylindole-labelled image into cells and determining the cell phenotypes according to their protein-protein dependence profile. These were analyzed using two new measures, Difference in Sums of Weighted cO-dependence/Anti-co-dependence profiles (DiSWOP and DiSWAP) for overall co-expression and anti-co-expression, respectively. These novel quantities were extracted using 11 Toponome Imaging System image stacks from either cancerous or normal human colorectal specimens. This approach enables one to easily identify protein pairs that have significantly higher/lower co-expression levels in cancerous tissue samples when compared with normal colon tissue. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/research/combi/research/bic/diswop.