TMAinspect, an EGEE Framework for Tissue MicroArray Image Handling

The merging between molecular biology and computer science is becoming a key point in knowledge discovery, in particular when huge amount of data coming from different laboratories need to be integrated and analyzed. For example Tissue MicroArray (TMA) is a high throughput technology that allows researchers to analyze several tissue samples in a parallel way. TMA is a good validation method of researcher's hypothesis about pathological tissue morphology and biomarkers evaluation. In this context, the Grid technology is a good opportunity to share data and solve intensive storage and computing problems. However, the exploitation of the Grid is not a trivial pursuit for many users. Nowadays, an important issue is to provide a simplified use of Grid resources, enabling the use of tools that scientists usually employ. In this paper, we present TMAinspect, a Web based system for Tissue Microarray experiment analysis that provides to not expert users a graphical interface to search for TMA images and to efficiently process them in EGEE. For the image elaboration we use PIMA(GE)2 Lib, the Parallel IMAGE processing GEnoa Library.