The translation of genomic sequencing technology to the clinic has greatly advanced personalized medicine. However, the presence of normal cells in tumors is a confounding factor in genome sequence analysis. Tumor purity, or the percentage of cancerous cells in whole tissue section, is a correction factor that can be used to improve the clinical utility of genomic sequencing. Currently, tumor purity is estimated visually by expert pathologists; however, it has been shown that there exist vast inter-observer discrepancies in tumor purity scoring. In this paper, we propose a quantitative image analysis pipeline for tumor purity estimation and provide a systematic comparison between pathologists' scores and our image-based tumor purity estimation.
Keywords: Histopathology; Quantitative Image Analysis.