Spatial heterogeneity of cancer associated protein expression in immunohistochemically stained images as an improved prognostic biomarker

ABSTRACT: The identification of new tumor biomarkers for patient stratification before therapy, for monitoring of disease progression, and for characterization of tumor biology plays a crucial role in cancer research. The status of these biomarkers is mostly scored manually by a pathologist and such scores typically, do not consider the spatial heterogeneity of the protein’s expression in the tissue. Using advanced image analysis methods, marker expression can be determined quantitatively with high accuracy and reproducibility on a per-cell level. To aggregate such per-cell marker expressions on a patient level, the expression values for single cells are usually averaged for the whole tissue. However, averaging neglects the spatial heterogeneity of the marker expression in the tissue. We present two

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PROVIDER: S-EPMC9806230 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature