A Novel Framework for Characterization of Tumor-Immune Spatial Relationships in Tumor Microenvironment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new framework for analyzing how different tumor regions influence nearby immune cells, using spatial data from multiplex immunohistochemistry in pancreatic cancer, with potential for large-scale image analysis.

Contribution

The novel framework systematically characterizes tumor-immune spatial relationships, addressing challenges of region distribution variability, and extends to large-scale whole slide image analysis.

Findings

Framework effectively demonstrates tumor region impact on immune response.

Applicable to multiplex immunohistochemistry data in pancreatic cancer.

Extensible to large-scale whole slide image analysis.

Abstract

Understanding the impact of tumor biology on the composition of nearby cells often requires characterizing the impact of biologically distinct tumor regions. Biomarkers have been developed to label biologically distinct tumor regions, but challenges arise because of differences in the spatial extent and distribution of differentially labeled regions. In this work, we present a framework for systematically investigating the impact of distinct tumor regions on cells near the tumor borders, accounting their cross spatial distributions. We apply the framework to multiplex immunohistochemistry (mIHC) studies of pancreatic cancer and show its efficacy in demonstrating how biologically different tumor regions impact the immune response in the tumor microenvironment. Furthermore, we show that the proposed framework can be extended to largescale whole slide image analysis.