Spatial organization and correlations of cell nuclei in brain tumors.

ABSTRACT: Accepting the hypothesis that cancers are self-organizing, opportunistic systems, it is crucial to understand the collective behavior of cancer cells in their tumorous heterogeneous environment. In the present paper, we ask the following basic question: Is this self-organization of tumor evolution reflected in the manner in which malignant cells are spatially distributed in their heterogeneous environment? We employ a variety of nontrivial statistical microstructural descriptors that arise in the theory of heterogeneous media to characterize the spatial distributions of the nuclei of both benign brain white matter cells and brain glioma cells as obtained from histological images. These descriptors, which include the pair correlation function, structure factor and various nearest neighbor f

SUBMITTER: Jiao Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3217938 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature