Spotting key differences between tumour samples holds the key to
understanding why some cancers progress more quickly than
others, and why patients respond differently to treatments. But
despite increased automation in many areas, this kind of
analysis still largely relies on expert pathologists looking
down the microscope at tumour samples and scoring the presence
of particular protein molecules. Regular readers of the blog
will know that Cancer Research UK recently launched the world’s
first citizen science cancer project Cell Slider to help break
this data bottleneck. But for some time, scientists have also
been looking at ways to automate the process and train machines
to do the hard work. Today, our scientists published their
latest progress towards this goal. Writing in the British
Journal of Cancer , Dr Ali and his team show how the automated
techniques the astronomers use to analyse deep sky images can
also detect subtle differences in protein levels between healthy
and cancerous breast cells. They us