While the standard clinical approach involves manual scoring of protein expression in tissues, this software approach represented a quantifiable method that provided continuous values for more thorough statistical analysis and was validated in multiple studies.28–30 Using this approach to analyze immunostaining, CCL2 and HGF were found to be detected in epithelial and stromal tissues in DCIS and IDC tissues (Figure 1a). Here, CCL2 is linked to ductal breast carcinoma in situ.