Q: What exactly is the TMA-Combiner? (2-5-05)
A: The TMA-Combiner is a TMA dataset combination program
designed to be used with the TMA-Deconvoluter. It serves the two following main functions:
- To combine replicate cores within a body of TMA data, residing either in a
single TMA or in multiple TMAs, and
- To combine multiple TMA together into a single file for analysis.
The TMA-Combiner should be particularly useful for laboratories that have large numbers
of TMA datasets and/or work with TMAs that contain large numbers of replicate cores.
Q: Why are there three separate score combination rules?
Can't I just average my TMA replicate cores? (2-5-05)
A: You can (Rule 2), but averaging might not be the best way to
combine your replicate data. We discuss this at length here
and in our publication. In short, replicate cores are only representatives of an entire biopsy, and not all
IHC antibodies stain quantitatively (which is the assumption you are making should you decide
to perform simple averaging with your data). Furthermore, if you were to average, you need to
remove equivocal cores from the average to avoid skewing downwards your average score. The
score combination rules we provide account for these additional considerations.
Q: I have a scoring system that is a quantitative
or semi-quantitative, continuous range system (i.e. not discrete numerals).
How do we adapt the TMA-Combiner to our scoring system? (2-26-05)
A: The TMA-Combiner can handle continuous range scoring systems.
You can find more information on how this is handled here,
and the walkthrough has been updated accordingly.
