| Affiliation: | (1) Cancer Diagnosis Program, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA;(2) Department of Pathology, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA;(3) Department of Pathology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA |
| Abstract: | Background Tissue Microarrays (TMAs) allow researchers to examine hundreds of small tissue samples on a single glass slide. The information held in a single TMA slide may easily involve Gigabytes of data. To benefit from TMA technology, the scientific community needs an open source TMA data exchange specification that will convey all of the data in a TMA experiment in a format that is understandable to both humans and computers. A data exchange specification for TMAs allows researchers to submit their data to journals and to public data repositories and to share or merge data from different laboratories. In May 2001, the Association of Pathology Informatics (API) hosted the first in a series of four workshops, co-sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, to develop an open, community-supported TMA data exchange specification. |
