Engineering a peer-to-peer collaboratory for tissue microarray research

This paper presents the design, development and eval-uation of a prototype peer-to-peer collaboratory for imag-ing, analyzing, and seamlessly sharing tissue microarrays (TMA), correlated clinical data, and experimental results across a consortium of distributed clinical and research sites. The overarching goal of this project is to facilitate cooperative oncology research aimed at improved under-standing of the underlying mechanisms of disease onset and progression while simultaneously providing new insight into therapy planning and treatment. Key components of the col-laboratory include a specication of metadata schematics for characterizing TMA specimens and abstracting their in-terpretations, an framework for automated and accurate analysis of digitized TMAs and a peer-to-peer infrastru-ture for indexing and discovery of TMA data and meta-data, and a novel, optimized decentralized search engine that supports exible querying with search guarantees and bounded costs. Prototype implementations of the automated TMA analysis component and the storage/discovery compo-nent and their evaluations are presented. 1