User talk:Esabo

In spite of the rapidly developing imaging technology, Pathologists are still relying on their visual skills to subjectively describe the microscopic changes that take place in cells and tissues biopsied from their patients. The human eye-brain axis is a great tool for qualitatively evaluate objects but lacks the quantitative skills for accurately evaluate diameters, areas, textures and dimensions. Quantitative Pathology is a relatively new field where computerized methods and algorithms are applied to microscopic images in purpose of measuring the changes observed in normal or pathological cells/tissues. These methods vary from simply counting cells that are immunohistochemically labeled for the presence of a specific marker, through evaluating the area and number of cells/blood vessels in a tumor, to more complex methods suitable for quantifying nuclear textures, cell/vessel polarity (orientation) to tissue architectural complexity (fractal and lacunar dimensions). Medical diagnosis would clearly benefit from applying a quantitative approach to the microscopical characterization of the pathological changes in involving cells and tissues. The major holdback for the success of such a quantitative approach in pathology is primarily related to the time consuming and highly interactive methods that are available with the current imaging technology. A professionally conservative approach may also play a role. For these reasons, quantitative pathology is still in its infancy and has been relatively neglected by technology developers. We need a wiki site where Pathologists, Biologists and other researchers/scientists who need to quantitatively characterize the changes observed in tissues and cells, will be able to communicate and exchange their experience regarding the suitability of a specific algorithm or method to be applied to their tissue sections. In such website, the use of such methods could be described in correlation with specific aims, scientific manuscripts and commercial software or hardware dedicated to such purposes could be posted and their advantage/disadvantage could discussed according to personal experiences from a variety of researchers, worldwide. Special needs for quantitative tissue evaluation could be posted here followed by brainstorming, where interesting ideas of developing novel 2D or 3D algorithms for tissue analysis will be discussed.