Spatiotemporal Noise Triggering Infiltrative Tumor Growth under Immune Surveillance

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spatiotemporal environmental noise influences tumor growth patterns, revealing a critical noise level that distinguishes between expansive and infiltrative growth, supported by theoretical, numerical, and clinical image comparisons.

Contribution

It introduces the structure factor to quantify tumor invasion and identifies a critical noise intensity that determines growth modes, linking environmental fluctuations to tumor morphology.

Findings

Homogeneous environment leads to expansive tumor growth.

Inhomogeneous environment causes infiltrative growth.

A critical noise intensity separates the two growth modes.

Abstract

A spatiotemporal noise is assumed to reflect the environmental fluctuation in a spatially extended tumor system. We introduce firstly the structure factor to reveal the invasive tumor growth quantitatively. The homogenous environment can lead to an expansive growth of the tumor cells, while the inhomogenous environment underlies an infiltrative growth. The different responses of above two cases are separated by a characteristic critical intensity of the spatiotemporal noise. Theoretical and numerical results present a close annotation to the clinical images.