As a highly heterogeneous disease, the progression of tumor is not only achieved by unlimited growth of the tumor cells, but also supported, stimulated, and nurtured by the microenvironment around it. However traditional qualitative and/or semi-quantitative parameters obtained by pathologist's visual examination have very limited capability to capture this interaction between tumor and its microenvironment. With the advent of digital pathology, computerized image analysis may provide a better tumor characterization and give new insights into this problem.
We propose a novel bioimage informatics pipeline for automatically characterizing the topological organization of different cell patterns in the tumor microenvironment. We apply this pipeline to the only publicly available large histopathology image dataset for a cohort of 190 patients with papillary renal cell carcinoma obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas project. Experimental results show that the proposed topological features can successfully stratify early- and middle-stage patients with distinct survival, and show superior performance to traditional clinical features and cellular morphological and intensity features. The proposed features not only provide new insights into the topological organizations of cancers, but also can be integrated with genomic data in future studies to develop new integrative biomarkers.
https://github.com/chengjun583/KIRP-topological-features.
, (Qianjin Feng).
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Bioinformatics (Oxford, England). 2017 Nov 09 [Epub ahead of print]
Jun Cheng, Xiaokui Mo, Xusheng Wang, Anil Parwani, Qianjin Feng, Kun Huang
Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Medical Image Processing, School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510515, China., Center for Biostatistics, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA., Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA., Department of Pathology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA.