Tissue Mapping as a City

About the episode

Scientists can zoom in deeper into the cells of the body. This makes all kinds of important research possible. Only at this level is it difficult to simultaneously study the interaction of cells and tissue formation as a whole.

A group of researchers wanted to change that. Can’t we map the tissues in a way that makes both possible? Overview and details.

You can manually paste data from individual cells onto data from a larger texture image, but that takes a lot of work. Algorithms have already gotten off to a promising start with this, but limited training data is holding development back again.

So they did it differently. Think of a large city that you want to map. You can stop at each intersection to identify the different types of buildings you see there. You can also note the location of each building. If you collect that, you have a card. With this you can say something about where you find buildings and how they together make up a city or neighborhood.

That’s what they did with different types of tissue, too. It allowed them to identify patterns that arise when different types of cells do their work in close proximity. What makes that possible? Among other things, better distinguish between healthy and abnormal tissues in images and check the interaction between tissue organization and tissue function. \

Read more: New computational method builds detailed maps of human tissue.