Increasingly automated techniques for arraying, immunostaining, and imaging tissue sections led us to design software for convenient management, display, and scoring. Demand for molecular marker data derived in situ from tissue has driven histology informatics automation to the point where one can envision the computer, rather than the microscope, as the primary viewing platform for histopathological scoring and diagnoses. Tissue microarrays (TMAs), with hundreds or even thousands of patients’ tissue sections on each slide, were the first step in this wave of automation. Via TMAs, increasingly rapid identification of the molecular patterns of cancer that define distinct clinical outcome
groups among patients has become possible. TMAs have moved the bottleneck of acquiring molecular pattern information away from sampling and processing the tissues to the tasks of scoring and results analyses. The need to read large numbers of new slides,
primarily for research purposes, is driving continuing advances