Patent ID: 8849579

Claim:
A quantitative method of detecting or monitoring cancer in a test cell from a subject comprising the steps: (a) characterizing centromere organization in the test cell using three-dimensional (3D) analysis comprising: (i) inputting image data of the 3D organization of centromeres; (ii) processing the image data using an image data processor to find a set of coordinates {(x i ,y i ,z i )}, i=1, . . . , N, where (x i , y i , z i ) is a position of the i th centromere, the processing comprising segmenting the centromeric region using a first threshold to segment the centromeric region from background and a second threshold to segment proximal centromeric regions from one another; (iii) finding 1: a set of distances {d i }, i=1, . . . , N, where d i is the distance between (x i ,y i ,z i ) and a nuclear centre or a nuclear border, 2: a set of volumes of the centromeres and/or set of intensities of the centromeres, wherein the set of {d i }, volumes and/or the intensity is utilized to characterize the centromere 3D organization; and (b) comparing a distribution of the distances between the centromeres and the nuclear centre or nuclear border of the test cell with a distribution of distances between the centromeres and the nuclear centre or nuclear border of a control cell having the same lineage as the test cell, wherein the comparison between the distribution of centromere distances of the test cell and the distribution of centromere distances of the control cell is used to detect or monitor cancer.