The Centre offers a digital histopathology facility, housed at the ICR (Sutton), for the generation of large clinically annotated imaging datasets for Artificial Intelligence analysis. Using a CODEX system for multiplex immunohistochemistry (IHC) and with dedicated technicial support, the facility aims to leverage the large amount of patient specimens, especially from clinical trials, available at the ICR, Royal Marsden Hospital and Imperial. These will be used to feed a data generation pipeline producing high dimensional geospatial IHC maps of a range of cancers to allow study of the tumour, tumour microenvironment, protein expression profiles and characterisation of tumour associated stromal and immune cell populations. In addition to providing this facility to Centre funded researchers, we aim to make the data available to ICR and Imperial research teams developing automated AI driven image analysis tools thereby expanding the repertoire of AI pathology solutions available to cancer biologists.
Access to the facility will be via on a competitive basis with requests for project proposals made throughout the year with timings dependent on capacity. Priority will be given to projects that address demonstrably important clinical/cancer research questions that require AI approaches to address them and have samples with detailed clinical annotation.
For information, please contact Chirine Sakr (Chirine.sakr@icr.ac.uk).
The Centre has access to a Fluidigm Hyperion mass spectrometry imaging system (UK Dementia Research Institute, Imperial) available for use at reduced cost by our funded researchers. The Hyperion Imaging System is a time-of-flight ICP-MS instrument and can achieve a resolution (1 μm2), which is comparable to light microscopy. It allows simultaneous interrogation of up to 37 protein markers using Maxpar® metal-tagged antibodies, and with the ability to utilize up to 135 channels, it is a highly multiparametric and quantitative approach for the identification of phenotypes and proteins on cells within tissue architecture.
For information, please contact Zoltan Takats (z.takats@imperial.ac.uk).
The Centre has funded the purchase of a Muvicyte microscope, housed at the ICR (Chelsea) as part of its imaging core facility. It supports the development of assays prior to testing using new microscopy/analytical techniques to confirm the reproducibility across different platforms. It is an automated live-cell imaging system designed to operate inside a cell culture incubator allowing the long term visualisation of cells under optimal conditions. It has an open design allowing the use of a wide variety of culture vessels and can accommodate microfluidics platforms. The microscope features three-color fluorescence plus brightfield imaging and has 4x, 10x, and 20x (LWD) objectives with digital zoom. Image stitching enables the analysis of larger objects such as tissue sections, stem cell colonies, or an entire well. Z-stacking extends the range of imaging in the z-direction for 3D objects or thicker samples such as spheroids. The microscope has image quantification software for commonly used assays and supports the easy generation of cellular movies.
For information, please contact Chris Bakal (chris.bakal@icr.ac.uk).