SAPHIR: a Shiny application to analyze tissue section images

Abstract

Study of cell populations in tissues using immunofluorescence is a powerful method for both basic and medical research. Image acquisitions performed by confocal microscopy notably allow excellent lateral resolution and more than 10 parameter measurements when using spectral or multiplex imaging. Analysis of such complex images can be very challenging and easily lead to bias and misinterpretation. Here, we have developed the Shiny Analytical Plot of Histological Image Results (SAPHIR), an R shiny application for histo-cytometry using scatterplot representation of data extracted by segmentation. It offers many features, such as filtering of spurious data points, selection of cell subsets on scatterplot, visualization of scatterplot selections back into the image, statistics of selected data and data annotation. Our application allows to characterize labeled cells, from their phenotype to their number and location in the tissue, as well as their interaction with other cells. SAPHIR is available from: https://github.com/elodiegermani/SAPHIR