Histopathology - CAG-IBD
Histopathology Unit
The Histopathology Unit explores the use of histological indexing and both traditional and advanced molecular pathology to identify patient subgroups, and integrates this with clinical data, genetic/genomics and patient-derived ex vivo studies. This will facilitate in-depth understanding of underlying biological differences and disease heterogeneity.
As part of this, we collaborate with Dept. of Pathology, St. Olavs Hospital, to develop the use of digital computational pathology to enable automated and more accurate image analysis of tissue samples for research and in the clinic. Our aim is to identify clinically relevant histopathological markers and provide pathologists with complementary tools to help release the highly unexplored potential for more precise and personalized diagnostics in IBD.
Objectives for ongoing research activities:
- Correlate histological indexing with endoscopic and clinical parameters and determine its prognostic and predictive value for short- and long-term clinical outcomes.
- Characterize mucosal immune cells in different mucosal compartments segmented by code-free deep learning image analysis in IBD-patients stratified with histological indexing.
- Identify and characterize histopathological traits, genomic-/genetic-, immunological- and molecular mechanisms illuminating the underlying differences between IBD-patient subgroups based on stratification with histological indexing.
- Use open-source software and tools for digital computational pathology and artificial intelligence (deep convolutional neural networks) to further develop models for automated image analysis of tissue sections.
- Identify, characterize, and validate clinically relevant histopathological and immunohistochemical markers.
