Unsupervised segmentation of mass spectrometric ion images characterizes morphology of tissues

Dan Guo, Kylie A. Bemis, Catherine Rawlins, Jeffrey N. Agar, Olga Vitek

Abstract: Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) characterizes the spatial distribution of ions in complex biological samples such as tissues. Since many tissues have complex morphology, treatments and conditions often affect the spatial distribution of the ions in morphology-specific ways. Evaluating the selectivity and the specificity of ion localization and regulation across morphology types is biologically important. However, MSI lacks algorithms for segmenting images at both single-ion and spatial resolution.