Ultra High Content Image Analysis and Phenotype Profiling of 3D Cultured Micro-Tissues

In this article, the authors showed how they have implemented image analysis and statistics on around 600 parameters on 3D cell cultures in 384-well plates on 44 human breast cancer cell lines. When we talk about big data, count…

We have developed a new image analysis platform to automatically profile 3D cell phenotypes with 598 parameters including morphology, topology, and texture parameters such as wavelet and image moments. As proof of concept, we analyzed mouse breast cancer cells (4T1 cells) in a 384-well plate format following exposure to a diverse set of compounds at different concentrations. The result showed concentration dependent phenotypic trajectories for different biologically active compounds that could be used to classify compounds based on their biological target. To demonstrate the wider applicability of our method, we analyzed the phenotypes of a collection of 44 human breast cancer cell lines cultured in 3D and showed that our method correctly distinguished basal-A, basal-B, luminal and ERBB2+ cell lines in a supervised nearest neighbor classification method.