UQCCR Seminar Series - Tissue Image Cytometry: Cellular Phenotypes in Spatial Context with Adjunct Professor Rupert C. Ecker.

INTRODUCTION: While flow cytometry has been available for researchers and clinicians for decades to perform functional analyses on single cells and determine cellular phenotypes of large cell populations in blood, technologies to perform a similar analysis in situ – ie. in the tissue, the actual localization of most immune responses – are relatively new.

METHODS: Our research teams at TissueGnostics and Queensland University of Technology have joined forces to combine TissueGnostics’ existing tissue cytometry technology platform and established knowhow with innovative AI solutions to establish The Virtual Histopathologist. This represents a tissue cytometry platform that allows to quantify immune responses where they happen – in the tissue.

RESULTS: Tissue Cytometry permits to determine the in-situ phenotype of individual cells as well as histological entities, like glands, vessels or tumor foci. Applications include but are not limited to the exploration of immune responses in situ and the tumor microenvironment and/or the spatial organization of cellular subpopulations. Earlier attempts to analyse single cells in tissue have mostly been subject to visual estimation, or – at best – to manual counting for decades. To better understand the function of inflammatory cells in tumor development, type and number of inflammatory cells and their proximity to glandular/tumor structures have to be analyzed in-situ and correlated with disease state. Using TissueFAXS™ Cytometry the time-consuming and error-prone human evaluation of stained histological sections can be approached with an observer-independent and reproducible technology platform, offering a high degree of automation, paired with user interaction at relevant points of the analytical workflow (Fig. 1).

DISCUSSION & CONCLUSIONS: The TissueFAXS Cytometry platform incorporates Machine & Deep Learning algorithms. It can do end-point assays as well as live-cell imaging and time-kinetic experiments to measure enzyme activity. It also promotes tissue cytometry to a new level of quality, where complex cellular interactions, intracellular expression profiles and signal transduction cascades can be addressed on the single-cell level but still in histological context, empowering precision diagnostics.