An Automated Quantitative Method to Analyze Immunohistochemistry and Immunocytochemistry Images

Abstract

AbstractImmunohistochemistry (IHC) plays an important role in target protein analysis. However, many researchers analyze IHC images by five/three-tier manual ranking methods based on stained area and density. Such manual scoring might be biased by the antibody amount, counterstaining density, overall brightness, and most importantly, researchers' ranking experience. The potential lack of reliability in manual approach drives us to develop an automatic tool to quantitatively analyze IHC, which can also be used for immunocytochemistry (ICC). We applied a “color deconvolution” method based on an red-green-blue (RGB) color vector matching the color of desired immunochemistry agent, 3,3′-diaminob..