Node Code Breakers: looking for patterns in lymph nodes

Where do we get the images of lymph nodes?

Breast cancer patients with cancerous lymph nodes will receive a surgery called "Axillary Lymph Node Dissection". This surgery will take out some of the lymph nodes. For researchers and doctors, these lymph nodes will be made into samples for diagnose and future research. These lymph nodes will be fixed in wax and cut into very thin pieces, then these pieces were fixed and dyed on the glass slides.

In current clinical practice, these slides are viewed with a microscope. Since the patient number is increasing, the number of images is also increasing, in turn more slides have to be hand out. But now, due to the development of imaging technology, the glass slides can be scanned using a whole slide image scanner (WSI scanner) into digitised images. Researchers and doctors can now view and share these images by simple operation on computers. Its benefits are innumerable such as easy access through the internet, avoidance of physical storage space, and no risk of breakage of slides to name a few. Besides, large amounts of high-quality WSIs are ideal for machine learning training and testing.

Some background on breast cancer

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the UK, around 150 peoples a day. 15% of all newly diagnosed cancers in the UK are breast cancer. If the cancer cells move into the lymph nodes in a breast cancer patient, we call this patient a lymph node-positive patient. About 30% of breast cancer patients are lymph node-positive. And the lymph node-positive patients have a 40% or lower overall survival rate than lymph node-negative patients.

How can we identify a germinal centre?

Germinal centres are the shallow pink circles in the lymph nodes. They usually have lighter-colour filled with a darker-colour border than surroundings.

Only One GC in this image:

There are two GCs in this image:

How to used the tools to draw the outline of the germinal centres?

A freehand pen is provided to do draw shapes:
Please note, you should close the current shape before release the selection.

What to do when you want to redo your work?

Please move the mouse to the mistake, and a "x" button will appear.
Simply click the "x" button, and this annotation will be deleted.

To finish your drawing:

Please click "Done" button and press "Next". Then the next image will appear.

Please click "Talk" button if you find some questions related to the annotation. We will reply you quickly!

If you want to stop all together, just close the browser.