Φ-score to replace Z score for phenotypic screening

Phenotypic screening by High Content Screening monitors all modification of phenotypic changes. The interest of this technology is having a significant content of biological information (phenotypic and target modifications) and this, cell by cell. This important content of information results in a very high amount of data that must be analyzed globally (with PCA reduction for example). Thus, the data analysis and statistics, especially the Z-score that everybody knows, need to be reviewed. Guyon et al boast Φ-score. What do you think about that?

“Using robust statistics and a variance model, we demonstrated that the Φ-score showed better sensitivity, selectivity and reproducibility compared to classical approaches. The improved performance of the Φ-score paves the way for cell-based screening of primary cells, which are often difficult to obtain from patients in sufficient numbers.”

Source : Guyon, L. et al. Ф-score: A cell-to-cell phenotypic scoring method for sensitive and selective hit discovery in cell-based assays.Sci. Rep. 5, 14221; doi: 10.1038/srep14221 (2015)