Patent ID: 8559693

Claim:
A method for automated determination of tissue characteristics, the method comprising: obtaining an image of a tissue sample, the image depicting cell nuclei and corresponding biomarkers in the tissue sample; and, by a computer executing software instructions: processing the image to identify in the image: the cell nuclei, corresponding biomarkers associated with the cell nuclei, and spatially-connected groups of the cell nuclei; computing characters of the spatially-connected groups of cell nuclei; and, based at least in part on the computed characters, highlighting regions corresponding to the spatially-connected groups of cell nuclei; wherein identifying the spatially-connected groups of the cell nuclei in the image comprises: identifying a selected set of the cell nuclei for which the corresponding biomarkers satisfy a selection criterion; establishing a network of cell-to-cell connections connecting adjacent ones of the cell nuclei; and identifying a group of the cell nuclei of the selected set that are all interconnected by at least one chain of the cell-to-cell connections wherein: the at least one chain passes only through cells of the selected set except for in at least one gap in which the chain passes through from 1 to n consecutive cells that are not in the selected set and at least one pair of cells in the group is not interconnected by any chain of the cell-to-cell connections that passes only through cells of the selected set.