Ace Therapeutics has many years of experience in psychiatric research and we can perform image analysis of tissue sections for our clients, transforming the large amount of data generated into actionable quantitative insights. We have a wide range of image analysis tools for many applications, such as cell counting, digital pathology machine learning, immune cell population analysis and spatial analysis.

Introduction of Digital Pathology in Psychiatry

Modern medicine conceptualizes psychiatric disorders as a brain disease. Digital pathology represents an electronic environment that acquires, manages, and analyzes interpretable digital information from slices that can be used to perform pathological analysis of psychiatric disorders and manage information related to this activity. Digital pathology techniques have evolved significantly over the past decade, and the use of digital pathology tools is critical to adapting to and leading the rapidly changing environment of 21st century neuropathology. Developments in digital pathology have provided important insights into the neural basis of psychiatric disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, and substance use disorders.

Fig. 1 Pipeline for pathology analysis. (Barker J, et al., 2016)

Digital Pathology Services

Ace Therapeutics offers clients a full suite of digital pathology services, including slide scanning, quantitative slide analysis, and custom development of image analysis algorithms. We work closely with our clients to determine the best digital pathology approach for their specific research questions, and will develop custom solutions when needed, as we aim to advance your research in psychiatric disorders and accelerate the development of antipsychotic therapies. We offer a full range of digital pathology services to our global clients：

• Slide Scanning

We offer a slide scanning service to digitize slides in brightfield or fluorescent format. Data from our slide scanning service can be shared on a USB stick/hard drive or in the cloud. We also offer pathologist scoring and evaluation.

• Highly Multiplexed Immunohistochemistry Services

We offer our clients the ability to go beyond traditional slide labeling and imaging, allowing them to achieve more than 10 markers from a single slide.

• Cell Counting

By using automated image processing, we can achieve quantification of cell subpopulation breakdown, determination of overlap and spread of distances between cell types of interest, and examination of protein expression changes in specific cell types.

• Biomarker Quantification and Colocalization

We can examine the range and distribution of important biomarkers in psychiatric disease pathology and examine changes in protein expression in specific cell types.

What Can We Help You Achieve in Psychiatry?

• Mental illness-related biomarker development to identify subtle changes and quantitative information from any image in a reproducible manner
• Comprehensive view of mental disorders and their impact on tissues
• Diagnosis of mental disorders
• Detection of receptors and markers indicated in psychiatric disorders
• Assessing the effects of anti-psychiatric drug treatment on animal tissues

Our Advantages

• High definition imaging to restore the complete morphology of cells
• Reasonable and competitive price
• Strict precision control, quality assurance
• Fast turnaround to meet your research needs in a timely manner

Ace Therapeutics has developed sophisticated image analysis and digital pathology tools, a customized toolbox that allows us to quantitatively analyze image data obtained from tissue sections and perform slide classification using machine learning techniques. We aim to provide high-quality scientific assistance for research related to psychiatric disorders, meeting our clients' needs in standard histology, histopathology, biomarker development, high-definition tissue section scanning, and digital image analysis. If you are interested in digital pathology services, please feel free to make an inquiry.

Reference

1. Barker J, et al. Automated classification of brain tumor type in whole-slide digital pathology images using local representative tiles. Med Image Anal. 2016, 30:60-71.