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Definiens and Beecher Instruments Sign Strategic Development Agreement for Automated Solutions for Tissue Microarray Image Analysis

Munich, Germany/Sun Prairie, USA – November 18, 2004: Definiens, a leading provider of high-content image analysis software, and Beecher Instruments, a leading tissue microarray instrumentation company, today announced they have entered into a strategic worldwide agreement for joint development of automated solutions for tissue microarray image analysis.
Beecher has pioneered the development of tissue microarray instrumentation, and has years of experience in making and using tissue microarrays in biomedical research. Definiens Cellenger® is a software for powerful automated high-content analysis of tissues and cellular assays that enable the reliable and fully automated extraction and detailed analysis of structures of interest even in complex image data and tasks.

Under the terms of the agreement, Beecher brings in the tissue microarray image domain expertise and Definiens provides the technological tools to build the specialized applications. Beecher uses Definiens' Cognition Network Technology to develop applications for automated tissue microarray analysis. These applications are designed to automatically identify cancer and stromal cells, select cellular populations of interest to the researcher, exclude background and staining artifacts, and to localize and quantitate staining in nuclear, cytoplasmic and membrane compartments over a wide variety of normal and diseased tissue types.
Although the production of cell and tissue microarrays (TMAs) is a relatively straight forward task for most laboratories, the evaluation of stained TMA slides remains tedious, time consuming and prone to error.

Current image analysis software requires extensive user interaction to properly identify cell populations, select regions of interest for scoring, optimize analysis parameters and organize the resulting raw data. Because of these drawbacks in current software, pathologists typically collect TMA data by manually assigning a composite staining score for each spot - often during multiple microscopy sessions over a period of days. Such manual scoring can result in serious inconsistencies between data collected at different microscopy sessions and introduces a significant bottleneck that hinders the use of TMAs in high-throughput analysis.
Using Definiens' image analysis engine Beecher has developed a suite of automated image analysis applications named TMAx that is capable of analyzing tissue microarray and other tissue images in a fully automated, user independent mode. TMAx processes batches of TMA images according to expert-designed classification rules that combine spectral, morphological and relational criteria to analyze an image using the same logical processes that a pathologist would employ.

"Image analysis on tissue images is difficult," said Juha Kononen, Chief Scientific Officer at Beecher Instruments. "To develop robust and stable applications different algorithms and image processing routines have to be combined and used together. We have found that Definiens technology provides an extremely flexible, feature-rich and sophisticated framework that allows rapid development of a wide range of image analysis applications."

"We are very pleased about the partnership with Beecher," adds Manfred Voglmaier, Vice President Sales & Marketing at Definiens. "Because of Beecher's expertise in the area of TMA´s in combination with Definiens' unique, object-oriented software technology, Beecher provides a solution which allows the automatization (high-throughput) and standardization of image analysis."