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Researchers have devised a new method to analyze images of a protein in a population of cells to quantify its distribution for that population, according to a new study. 

The findings of the study can be significant for medical implications as the cellular location of a protein is directly linked to its function, the press release said. It also added that the result is particularly important because HDGC is asymptomatic and, at the moment, its early detection is not reliable, which means that the disease still has extremely high mortality. The new algorithm will hopefully change that.

Gastric cancer is the fourth common cause of cancer in the world. Hereditary diffuse gastric cancer (HDGC) makes up to 3 percent of all cases. 

"Our algorithm can now be used as a complementary approach to evaluate the pathogenicity of E-cadherin," said one of the lead researcher  Raquel Seruca, in the press release. "Moreover, it can be applied to a wide range of proteins and, more importantly, to diseases characterized by aberrant protein expression or trafficking deregulation."

"Our algorithm was not only able to pinpoint the protein location, but also to quantify it in each cellular compartment. While the MMR value gave us the protein dispersion."

The study has been published in the journal European Journal of Human Genetics.