Breast Cancer Microscopy Data Capture (EIF017)
Managing microscope images
Available now
ANDS Data Capture Program
The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) is developing the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) under the Federal Education Infrastructure Fund Super Science budget. Included is a Data Capture Program, which provides funding, including to the University of Sydney, for adaptation of infrastructure for creation and capture of research data to allow effective integration into the ARDC.
Intersect is implementing the first ANDS-Sydney Data Capture project, which targets improvements to the management of microscopic images for breast cancer research, so as to allow suitable non-identified versions of the images to be made available more broadly to researchers and discoverable in the ARDC.
Breast Cancer Research
The Breast Cancer Research Group, Westmead Institute for Cancer Research (WICR) and the national Breast Cancer Tissue Bank have a strong human tissue-based research focus. The goal of each of these major research programs is the development of new knowledge to guide prevention and better treatments for breast cancer.
The Breast Cancer Research Group’s projects are aimed towards understanding endocrine action in human primary tissue derived from normal breast and in breast cancer. Specifically, the group is using normal breast cultures to understand how hormones influence the biology of the normal breast, and how carcinogenic insult may affect response to hormones. In breast cancer cells, the group is studying how the position within the nucleus of endocrine transcription factors influence their molecular action, and how the altered nuclear features observed in cancers impact on endocrine regulation.
The Breast Cancer Tissue Bank has been established to collect and store biospecimens from consented donors with breast cancer, and to maintain clinical and other information relating to each case, with the objective of making these materials available to researchers with projects that are scientifically and ethically valid.
Project Scope
The Data Capture project has delivered two major additions to breast cancer research.
Firstly, the Hamamatsu Nanozoomer takes scanned images of tissue sections, producing very large image files that are not efficiently handled by analysis software. The previous processes required many hours of operator time to prepare each digital image file for further analysis. Intersect developed an automated system for splitting the files and saving the parts in an industry-standard format.
In the second part of the project, Intersect added functionality for automatic creation of image thumbnails which can be returned for viewing by researchers using the Tissue Bank search engine, with the web interface allowing zooming and panning over the images.
Records for the image collections will be provided to Research Data Australia, the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) collection registry, to allow for easy discovery.
Project sheet available here
This project is supported by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). ANDS is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy Program and the Education Investment Fund (EIF) Super Science Initiative.