Journal article
Harnessing citizen science through mobile phone technology to screen for immunohistochemical biomarkers in bladder cancer
- Abstract:
- Background Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is often used in personalisation of cancer treatments. Analysis of large data sets to uncover predictive biomarkers by specialists can be enormously time-consuming. Here we investigated crowdsourcing as a means of reliably analysing immunostained cancer samples to discover biomarkers predictive of cancer survival. Methods We crowdsourced the analysis of bladder cancer TMA core samples through the smartphone app ‘Reverse the Odds’. Scores from members of the public were pooled and compared to a gold standard set scored by appropriate specialists. We also used crowdsourced scores to assess associations with disease-specific survival. Results Data were collected over 721 days, with 4,744,339 classifications performed. The average time per classification was approximately 15 s, with approximately 20,000 h total non-gaming time contributed. The correlation between crowdsourced and expert H-scores (staining intensity × proportion) varied from 0.65 to 0.92 across the markers tested, with six of 10 correlation coefficients at least 0.80. At least two markers (MRE11 and CK20) were significantly associated with survival in patients with bladder cancer, and a further three markers showed results warranting expert follow-up. Conclusions Crowdsourcing through a smartphone app has the potential to accurately screen IHC data and greatly increase the speed of biomarker discovery.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.4MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41416-018-0156-0
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- British Journal of Cancer More from this journal
- Volume:
- 119
- Pages:
- pages220–229
- Publication date:
- 2018-07-11
- Acceptance date:
- 2018-05-31
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1532-1827
- ISSN:
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0007-0920
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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pubs:857969
- UUID:
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uuid:b2eb8ff0-ae6f-488d-b3ab-fd765e63f7c0
- Local pid:
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pubs:857969
- Source identifiers:
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857969
- Deposit date:
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2018-06-18
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Smittenaar et al
- Copyright date:
- 2018
- Notes:
- This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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