Annotation and query of tissue microarray data using the NCI Thesaurus

Background: The Stanford Tissue Microarray Database (TMAD) is a repository of data serving a consortium of pathologists and biomedical researchers. The tissue samples in TMAD are annotated with multiple free-text fields, specifying the pathological diagnoses for each sample. These text annotations are not structured according to any ontology, making future integration of this resource with other biological and clinical data difficult. Results: We developed methods to map these annotations to the NCI thesaurus. Using the NCIT we can effectively represent annotations for about 86% of the samples. We demonstrate how this mapping enables ontology driven integration and querying of tissue microarray data. We have deployed the mapping and ontology driven querying tools at the TMAD site for general use. Conclusion: We have demonstrated that we can effectively map the diagnosis-related terms describing a sample in TMAD to the NCI-T. The NCI thesaurus terms have a wide coverage and provide ter...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Nigam H. Shah, Daniel L. Rubin, Inigo Espinosa, Kelli Montgomery, Mark A. Musen
• Keywords: BMCBI 2007, Stanford Tissue Microarray, Tissue MicroArray, Tissue Microarray Database