Map the fabric as a city

About the episode

Scientists can zoom even deeper into the cells of our body. This makes all kinds of important research possible. Only at this level is it difficult to simultaneously study the interaction between cells and the composition of the tissue as a whole.

A group of researchers wanted to change that. Can’t we map tissues in such a way that both are possible? Overview and detail.

You can manually paste individual cell data onto larger image data of the tissue, but it’s a lot of work. Algorithms have already gotten off to a promising start with this, but limited training data is once again hampering development.

So they did it differently. Think of a major city you want to map. You could stand at each intersection to determine the different types of buildings you see there. You can also note the location of each building. If you combine that, you have a card. With this you can say something about where you find which buildings and how they together form a city or a district.

This is also what they have done with different types of fabrics. This allowed them to determine the patterns that arise when different types of cells perform their work in close proximity. What makes this possible? Among other things, to make a much better distinction between healthy and abnormal tissues on the images and to study the interplay between tissue organization and tissue function.\

Read more: New computational method builds detailed maps of human tissue.