HBMITool: a user-friendly software for labeling Human Brain Microscopy Images

Abstract

One of the most popular tools for quantifying protein expression is Immunofluorescence (IF). Although IF is widely applied in drug discovery research and assessing disease mechanisms, it has great room for improvement on the task of analyzing human postmortem brain samples. IF analysis of postmortem human tissue relies mostly on manual interaction, which is often error-prone and leading to low inter and intra-observer reproducibility. The high level of autofluorescence caused by accumulation of lipofuscin pigment during aging impedes systematic analyses of human postmortem brain samples. A method for automating cell counting and classification in IF microscopy of human postmortem brains was proposed before, which speeds up the quantification task while improving reproducibility. To correct for misclassified cells by the algorithm, we created HBFMTool, a software package that ease the process of editing the result produced by cell detection/classification algorithm.