A multitype Fiksel interaction model for tumour immune microenvironments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new multitype Fiksel interaction model for analyzing the spatial distribution of cells in tumour immune microenvironments, capturing complex interactions and inhomogeneity in cancer tissues.

Contribution

It presents a novel inhomogeneous multitype Gibbs point process model with Fiksel interaction, tailored for digital pathology data in cancer research.

Findings

Effective modeling of cell interactions in tumour microenvironments

Application to non-small-cell lung cancer data

Robust estimation via maximum pseudolikelihood

Abstract

The tumour microenvironment plays a fundamental role in understanding the development and progression of cancer. This paper proposes a novel spatial point process model that accounts for inhomogeneity and interaction to flexibly model a complex database of cells in the tumour immune microenvironments of a cohort of patients with non-small-cell lung cancer whose samples have been processed using digital pathology techniques. Specifically, an inhomogeneous multitype Gibbs point process model with an associated Fiksel-type interaction function is proposed. Estimation and inference procedures are conducted through maximum pseudolikelihood, considering replicated multitype point patterns.