Combining multiple spatial statistics enhances the description of immune cell localisation within tumours.

ABSTRACT: Digital pathology enables computational analysis algorithms to be applied at scale to histological images. An example is the identification of immune cells within solid tumours. Image analysis algorithms can extract precise cell locations from immunohistochemistry slides, but the resulting spatial coordinates, or point patterns, can be difficult to interpret. Since localisation of immune cells within tumours may reflect their functional status and correlates with patient prognosis, novel descriptors of their spatial distributions are of biological and clinical interest. A range of spatial statistics have been used to analyse such point patterns but, individually, these approaches only partially describe complex immune cell distributions. In this study, we apply three spatial statistics to

SUBMITTER: Bull JA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7596100 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature