Award winning work on the NGS

We are please to announce that Alex Wright and Darren Treanor from St James University hospital in Leeds won best poster award for 'Utilising caGrid Infrastructure for Tissue MicroArray Analysis' presented at the recent joint NCRI / NCI conference in London. This work was carried out in collaboration with NGS staff.

Alex and Darren are investigating the use image processing techniques to automatically highlight potentially cancerous cells in within a series of thin slices of tissue - called Tissue MicroArrays (TMAs) - so they can be examined by an expert.  The slices are stained to mark out certain proteins and imaged at very high resolution.  Software developed at Leeds identifies patterns within the images that are characteristic of cancer.

The individual images are very large and processing requires significant computer power. Alex, Darren and their collaborators at Leeds University in the UK, Ohio State and Emory Universities in the US and within the NGS are using the software from the Cancer Bioinformatics Grid Program (caBIG) to distribute the work.  By distributing the work, the time taken to process a batch of 260 samples drops from three-quarters of an hour to 10 seconds.