Stone Glenn, Clifford David, Gustafsson Johan O R, McColl Shaun R, Hoffmann Peter
School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
BMC Res Notes. 2012 Aug 7;5:419. doi: 10.1186/1756-0500-5-419.
Imaging Mass Spectrometry (IMS) provides a means to measure the spatial distribution of biochemical features on the surface of a sectioned tissue sample. IMS datasets are typically huge and visualisation and subsequent analysis can be challenging. Principal component analysis (PCA) is one popular data reduction technique that has been used and we propose another; the minimum noise fraction (MNF) transform which is popular in remote sensing.
The MNF transform is able to extract spatially coherent information from IMS data. The MNF transform is implemented through an R-package which is available together with example data from http://staff.scm.uws.edu.au/~glenn/∖#Software.
In our example, the MNF transform was able to find additional images of interest. The extracted information forms a useful basis for subsequent analyses.
