Automating Immunohistochemistry Standardization in your Laboratory

• published: 09 Jul 2015
• views: 24

Tissue-based immunohistochemical (IHC) data are important and variability in staining quality has a major impact on data quality. Sometimes this is the only type of data available to support critical decisions in research, business, or diagnostics. Although that should be reason enough to care a great deal about data quality, often this seems to be an area with room for improvement. In a case study BRAF V600E (Run 37) with the Canadian Immunohistochemistry Quality Control (cIQc), participating laboratories were asked to stain a colorectal carcinoma tissue microarray enriched for MLH1-deficient cases. Additionally, the slides stained by the participating laboratories also contained BRAF V600E genetically defined IHC Reference Standard cell lines provided by Horizon Diagnostics. Image analysis was used to quantify the staining quality and compared to the assessor panel, with excellent results. Using the same analysis algorithms it was possible to reproduce the same correlation to the assessor panel, demonstrating the possibility of using genetically defined cell lines with automated image analysis to assess laboratory staining quality.