Carnegie Mellon University student Justin Newberg and Professor Robert Murphy said their software "toolbox" is intended to help bioscience researchers characterize protein patterns in human tissues to aid in cancer diagnosis and therapy.

"Distribution of proteins in a cell or group of cells can be used to identify the state of surrounding tissue, whether it is healthy or diseased," said Newberg.

Newberg said researchers are increasingly collecting large numbers of images due to the availability of automated microscopes. Such images, he said, provide an excellent opportunity for improving the understanding of biological processes but also create a need for automated bioimage analysis tools.

Newberg and Murphy describe their study in the Journal of Proteome Research.