NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
 CELL IMAGING FACILITY
  Department of Cell & Molecular Biology  
  Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center

 
  Feinberg School of Medicine

Nikon Imaging Center at Northwestern University
   

 
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Last updated on November 17, 2009


  TissueGnostics Cell Analyzer
 

The Cell Imaging Facility has been selected by TissueGnostics (Vienna, Austria) to be their first and at present the only reference center in the U.S.

The TissueGnostics System is a highly innovative imaging equipment that combines the analytical and cell counting capability of a flow cytometer with the spatial resolution of a microscope. The TissueGnostics imager is capable of acquiring both epifluorescence and brightfield images and stitch the serial images into a high resolution montage, which allows users to zoom in and out of their "virtual slides" without losing resolution - equilvalent to an online geographical map.

The TissueGnostics Cell Analysis System will perform:

  • Automated multi-channel image acquisition
  • Image Stitching and Specimen Overview (see figure 1)
  • Automated single cell detection
  • Dotplot operations and gating on subpopulations - similar to flow cytometry
  • Backward and Forward gating from dotplot to image and image to dotplot
  • Statistical data in tables and expoert in Excel as well as ASCII formats
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    Figure 1 Tissue-stitching function of Tissuegnostics Cell Analysis System creates “virtual slides” that contains large overview of tissue specimens without losing accuracy in details
       
     
    Once the region of interest has been scanned, and the montaged "virtual slide" has been obtained, the image analysis software will automtically detect individual cells, and each cellular "event" will be represented in a flow-cytometry-like scattergram (see Figure 2).

    The scattergram functions precisely like aflow cytometry dotplot wherein one can gate any subpopulation of cells based on any combination of distributions of fluorescence intensity and size. Statistical data will be instantly displayed by the TissueGnostics system for each gated quadrant, as shown below.
     
    Figure 2 Co-expression patterns of the stained cells categorized by user-defined "gates" and the corresponding statistical analysis.
       
     
    The TissueGnostics system is also capable of bi-directional data viewing. A gated population of cells within the scattergram can be easily traced back to their actual histological location in the specimen, as can be seen by the interactive display attached below in Figure 3
     

    Figure 3: Click the thumbnail to play

    This will take ~5-10 second to open depending on your connection speed; the interactive site will allow you to navigate through the cell recognition process within the TissueQuest software (adapted from TissueGnostics website)
       
     
    By clicking on any given cell in the image, users can also directly trace its phenotypic profile back to the scattergram. The free hand gating function also allows user to perform objective statistical analysis based on the scattergrams rather than on the images, as shown in Figure 4 below. For more information, please visit TissueGnostics website, or contact Drs. Teng-Leong Chew and Wilson Liu
     
     
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