Physics Approaches to the Spatial Distribution of Immune Cells in Tumors
Abstract
The goal of immunotherapy is to enhance the ability of the immune system to kill cancer cells. Immunotherapy is more effective and, in general, the prognosis is better, when more immune cells infiltrate the tumor. We explore the question of whether the spatial distribution rather than just the density of immune cells in the tumor is important in forecasting whether cancer recurs. After reviewing previous work on this issue, we introduce a novel application of maximum entropy to quantify the spatial distribution of discrete point-like objects. We apply our approach to B and T cells in images of tumor tissue taken from triple negative breast cancer (TBNC) patients. We find that there is a distinct difference in the spatial distribution of immune cells between good clinical outcome (no recurrence of cancer within at least 5 years of diagnosis) and poor clinical outcome (recurrence within 3 years of diagnosis). Our results highlight the importance of spatial distribution of immune cells within tumors with regard to clinical outcome, and raise new questions on their role in cancer recurrence.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1911.11846,
title = {Physics Approaches to the Spatial Distribution of Immune Cells in Tumors},
author = {Clare C. Yu and Juliana C. Wortman and Ting-Fang He and Shawn Solomon and Robert Z. Zhang and Anthony Rosario and Roger Wang and Travis Y. Tu and Daniel Schmolze and Yuan Yuan and Susan E. Yost and Xuefei Li and Herbert Levine and Gurinder Atwal and Peter P. Lee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.11846},
year = {2019}
}