Spatial Analysis For Histopathology: A Statistical Approach

A pattern analysis approach is proposed to model spatial interaction between the immune cells and the islets of cancer cells within the tumor microenvironment. Embedded in a statistical null hypothesis paradigm, the proposed solution provides a novel mechanism to extract quantitative, system-level snap-shot of the tumor microenvironment during immunotherapy. Experimental results on synthetic and real histopathological data suggest the potential of our technique in mining robust information from the spatial distribution of immune cells at different time-points during cancer treatment. This statistical framework could be potentially adopted in future large-scale experimental studies to objectively monitor disease progression and the patient’s response to immune therapy.