Print Email Facebook Twitter Spatial Profiling of Tumor Microenvironments in Breast Cancer Title Spatial Profiling of Tumor Microenvironments in Breast Cancer Author Brouwer, Niek (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science) Contributor Wessels, L.F.A. (mentor) Vis, Daniël J. (mentor) Liem, C.C.S. (graduation committee) P. Gonçalves, Joana (graduation committee) Degree granting institution Delft University of Technology Programme Computer Science | Bioinformatics Date 2023-09-04 Abstract The tumor composition of breast cancer determines how tumors behave. Yet, there is a limited understanding of the arrangement of tumor cells in relation to cells in the tumor microenvironment (TME). In this research, we have characterized distance relationships between 324 cell-type pairs in 749 tissue samples of the Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium (METABRIC) study using Weibull distribution estimations, summarizing comprehensive spatial relationships with two parameters. The research showcased the first application of the method to a dataset of this substantial size and a dataset acquired with imaging mass cytometry. We identified distinct spatial relationships among breast cancer subtypes, particularly for basal, HER2-enriched, and luminal A tumors. The spatial relationships indicate attractive and repulsive interactions between different cell types and define cellular arrangements regardless of cellular abundance.Moreover, several spatial relationships had significant associations with survival outcomes. Both findings could improve patient stratification and prognosis and emphasize the wealth of information that spatial analyses can retrieve. The results also confirm that Weibull distribution estimations are a suitable and effective method to summarize distance distributions. The application to other cohorts could lead to new insights into the tumor composition of different cancer types. Finally, the spatial profiling method was used to characterize neighborhoods and revealed distinct spatial relationships consistent with neighborhood characteristics but also provided new hallmarks. Subject Spatial analysisCancerSurvival AnalysisBreast Cancer To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:765caaef-0a78-48c3-ab7e-a9512cc20978 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights © 2023 Niek Brouwer Files PDF ThesisReport_NiekBrouwer.pdf 19.79 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:765caaef-0a78-48c3-ab7e-a9512cc20978/datastream/OBJ/view