Welcome to the SIMBAD renal cell cancer data

 

 

In the SIMBAD project, the ETH Zurich provides cancer data to evaluate and test appropriate algorithms. This dataset can be downloaded on this site.

Renal Cancer Images

Here, 133 tissue microarray (TMA) images are stored as .jpg, approx. 3000x3000 px in size, each. The TMAs show several hundreds of cells, each. They are stained for protein MIB-1, a protein which is present in cell nuclei of dividing cells. Some cancer cells may be positive for MIB-1 (brown spots), some negative (blue spots). Also, healty cells may be positive or negative for this protein (also brown and blue). The TMAs are also stained with a blue color that shows the cell nuclei of the cells.

Labeled Images

Pathologists would look at such TMA images to diagnose and grade the cancer by means of nucleus shape, cell shape, estimate of stained nuclei. Cancer nuclei tend to be larger, bulky and unsharp. Moreover, cancer cells tend to devide more often.

In the folder "Labels", 25 .tif and .svg files show hundreds of labeled cell nuclei of either hematoxylin and eosin (HE) stained or MIB-1 stained TMAs. The MIB labeling was done by two pathologists for the same TMA images. They drew an octagon around the nucelei and  labeled it for cancerous or non-cancerous. Note that the octagons are not the exact shape of the nuclei, and that the two pathologists labeled several nuclei differently. Even for them, it's not absolutely clear which cell is cancer or not.

Nevertheless, it would be a tremendous progress in cancer detection and treatment to automate the nucleus detection, shape regognition, tumor classification and finally the tumor grading of the entire TMA spot by cancer cell estimation.

In the SIMBAD context, it is a huge challenge to find similarity measures between images of cell nuclei. The information of cancer or non-cancer might be hidden in the non-metric similarity of cell/nucleus shapes.


Example images (downscaled) are:

 

With labeled cell nuclei (.svg)

 

Patches

From the labeled MIB-1 cell images, we extracted patches (80x80px .tif images) showing one cell nucleus per patch in the middle. Each patch is named with the TMA id, nucleus id within the patch, label of pathologist 1 and label of pathologist 2. Note that only those nuclei were collected in the patches that both pathologists identified as a nuleus (i.e. labeled it). Note further, that both pathologists might give a different label for one patch.

Histograms are also calculated for the grayscaled MIB patches and added in the folder "Histograms". The histogram file has following format: the first column lists the patient id (i.e. TMA id). The second column is for the nucleus id (consecutive number per patch). The third and fourth columns give the label of pathologist 1 and 2 for this patch. Columns 5 to 68 show the 64-bin histogram, one histogram per row.

Finally, in the folder "Code", some matlab code can be found to generate the patches and to generate the histograms. To compare histograms and to set up a dissimilarity matrix, additional code would be necessary.

 

Example patches:

                  

 

 

contact: peter.schueffler@inf.ethz.ch