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Selection Of Optimal Quantile Protein Biomarkers Based On Cell-Level Immunohistochemistry Data, Misung Yi, Tingting Zhan, Amy R. Peck, Jeffrey A. Hooke, Albert J. Kovatich, Craig D. Shriver, Hai Hu, Yunguang Sun, Hallgeir Rui, Inna Chervoneva

Department of Pharmacology, Physiology, and Cancer Biology Faculty Papers

BACKGROUND: Protein biomarkers of cancer progression and response to therapy are increasingly important for improving personalized medicine. Advanced quantitative pathology platforms enable measurement of protein expression in tissues at the single-cell level. However, this rich quantitative cell-by-cell biomarker information is most often not exploited. Instead, it is reduced to a single mean across the cells of interest or converted into a simple proportion of binary biomarker-positive or -negative cells.

RESULTS: We investigated the utility of retaining all quantitative information at the single-cell level by considering the values of the quantile function (inverse of the cumulative distribution function) estimated from a …