On Nov 5, 2011, at 7:20 PM, ScottDaniel wrote:

So I have a text file that looks like this:
        "Label"       "X"   "Y"   "Slice"
1       "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        348     506     1
2       "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        359     505     1
3       "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        356     524     1
4       "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        2       0       1
5       "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        412     872     1
6       "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        422     863     1
7       "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        429     858     1
8       "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        429     880     1
9       "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        437     865     1
10      "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        447     855     1
11      "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        450     868     1
12      "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        447     875     1
13      "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        439     885     1
14      "Field_1_R3D_D3D_PRJ_w617.tif"        2       8       1

What it represents are the locations of centromeres per nucleus in a
microscope image. What I need to do is do a dist() on each grouping (the grouping being separated by the low values of x and y's) and then compute an average. The part that I'm having trouble with is writing code that will
allow R to separate these objects.

I'm having trouble figuring out what you mean by "separating the objects". Each row is a separate reading, and I think you just want pairwise distances, right?

Do I have to find some way of creating
separate data frames for each object?

I don't think so. You need to read this file into a data.frame which should be fairly trivial with read.table is you specify the header=TRUE parameter.

Or is there a way to parse the file
and generate a single data frame of all the pairwise distances?

Then assuming there is now a data.frame named "dat" with those values:

dist( cbind(dat$X, dat$Y))

One stumbling block might have been recognizing that the dist function will not work with two x and y arguments but rather requires a matrix (or something coercible to a matrix) as its first argument. This would also have worked:

dist(dat[ , c("X", "Y")])

--
David.

Any
suggestions or example code would be much appreciated. Thanks!

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David Winsemius, MD
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