A Novel Framework for Characterization of Tumor-Immune Spatial Relationships in Tumor Microenvironment
This work addresses the problem of spatial analysis in tumor microenvironments for cancer researchers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing biomarker methods.
The authors tackled the challenge of characterizing how biologically distinct tumor regions affect nearby immune cells by developing a framework that accounts for spatial distributions, applying it to pancreatic cancer mIHC studies to demonstrate its efficacy in analyzing tumor-immune interactions.
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.