OSU Department of Biomedical Informatics

BMI-authored Manuscript Accepted for Publication in Mainstream Pathology Journal

Tuesday 02/05/2008

The OSU Department of Biomedical Informatics is proud to announce that one of its latest manuscripts has been accepted for publication in the prestigious Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine journal. The manuscript "Computer-assisted Grading of Neuroblastic Differentiation" will be featured in an upcoming issue.

Below is a summary of the manuscript [written by Jun Kong]:

Peripheral Neuroblastic Tumors (pNTs; neuroblastoma, ganglioneuroblastoma, ganglioneuroma) are members of one of the most frequently-occurring tumor groups in children. The current prognostic evaluation for patients with this disease requires microscopic examination of tumor tissues for determining certain morphological characteristics by pathologists. Since this process inevitably involves visual evaluation, the prognosis decision would often be subject to inter- and intra-reviewer variability as experience, fatigue and many other factors could affect the decision making process, and as a result, potentially degrading the reproducibility. Thanks to the advent of modern digital scanners, it is now feasible to scan the whole neuroblastoma tissue specimens and acquire the whole-slide digital images. Computerized analysis of these images can generate key quantifiable parameters useful in the prognostic evaluation and, thus, assist pathologists.

We have developed a novel system to determine the grade of neuroblastic differentiation that can be used for the prognostic evaluation of neuroblastoma. Equipped with this system, pathologists can work more efficiently in their histopathology review of neuroblastoma, leading to a potential improvement of reproducibility.

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