A program for analyzing the morphological organization of tessellated cellular mosaics

We have constructed a computer program that allows sequential sets of data from tessellated cellular mosaics to be evaluated such that the presence and position of abnormal cells in the mosaic can be easily, quickly, and quantitatively identified. Conventional parametric analysis of the global morpholgical organization of large tesselated cellular mosaics does not provide the necessary granularity of analysis to allow for rapid identification of such atypical cellular structures. Our program, written in C using structured programming techniques, provides the needed analytical granularity for detailed studies of subsections of large cellular mosaics, while also providing conventional statistical evaluation of the dataset. The architecture of the program is modular and designed as a set of procedures and subprocesses that can either analyze the entire mosaic or discrete sets of cells within the larger sample. The types of morphological heterogeneity (or dishomogeneity) that the program can investigate occur in a variety of biological mosaics where there is a continuum of the structural features, including fairly regular linear stacked arrays of cells or tissue partitions, to less regular mosaics of epithelial or endothelial cell layers, to heterogeneous patterns found on tissue surfaces, such as fluorescein dye-highlighted features on the human conjunctiva. The program has been used to successfully evaluate several different types of mosaics.