ArticleBreast cancer research : BCR2015
An ecological measure of immune-cancer colocalization as a prognostic factor for breast cancer.
Article in Breast cancer research : BCR, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 71 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
71 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Integrated imaging and molecular analysis to decipher tumor microenvironment in the era of immunotherapy.Seminars in cancer biology · 2022Pooled it
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- AI-powered and manual assessment of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes in early HER2-positive breast cancer in NSABP B-41.NPJ breast cancer · 2026Article
- geneSCOPE: gene spatial co-occurrence of pairwise expression.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2026Article
- Neoadjuvant Endocrine Treatment plus Mammaglobin-A DNA Vaccine Induces Antitumor Immune Responses in the Primary Tumor and Peripheral Blood of Patients with Breast Cancer: Insights from a Phase Ib Clinical Trial.Cancer immunology research · 2026Article
- Distinct Tumor-Immune Ecologies in Patients with Lung Cancer Predict Progression and Define a Clinical Biomarker of Therapy Response.Cancer research · 2026Article
- The consensus molecular subtypes of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.Signal transduction and targeted therapy · 2026Article
- Spatial single-cell multi-omics characterization of the tumor microenvironment heterogeneity by HER-2 expression status in gastric cancer.Molecular cancer · 2026Article
- Modelling Immune Dynamics in Locally Advanced MSI-H/dMMR Colorectal Cancer with Neoadjuvant Pembrolizumab Treatment: From Differential Equations to an Agent-Based Framework.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Kernel mean matching enhances risk estimation under spatial distribution shifts.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Integrated local and global Ki67 profiling for prognostic stratification and therapeutic guidance in high-grade neuroendocrine neoplasms: a multicenter validation study.International journal of surgery (London, England) · 2025Article
- Spatial organization of the tumor-immune microenvironment in ER-positive breast cancer: remodeling during treatment and associations with clinical response.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Computational pathology applied to clinical colorectal cancer cohorts identifies immune and endothelial cell spatial patterns predictive of outcome.The Journal of pathology · 2025Article
- Deciphering cell to cell spatial relationship for pathology images using SpatialQPFs.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Tumor evolution metrics predict recurrence beyond 10 years in locally advanced prostate cancer.Nature cancer · 2024Article
- Spatial Multiplexing and Omics.Nature reviews. Methods primers · 2024Article
- AI-based intra-tumor heterogeneity score of Ki67 expression as a prognostic marker for early-stage ER+/HER2- breast cancer.The journal of pathology. Clinical research · 2024Article
- Evaluation of tumour infiltrating lymphocytes in luminal breast cancer using artificial intelligence.British journal of cancer · 2023Article
- Article
- An artificial intelligence-based ecological index for prognostic evaluation of colorectal cancer.BMC cancer · 2023Article
11 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
introductionAbundance of immune cells has been shown to have prognostic and predictive significance in many tumor types. Beyond abundance, the spatial organization of immune cells in relation to cancer cells may also have significant functional and clinical implications. However there is a lack of systematic methods to quantify spatial associations between immune and cancer cells.
methodsWe applied ecological measures of species interactions to digital pathology images for investigating the spatial associations of immune and cancer cells in breast cancer. We used the Morisita-Horn similarity index, an ecological measure of community structure and predator-prey interactions, to quantify the extent to which cancer cells and immune cells colocalize in whole-tumor histology sections. We related this index to disease-specific survival of 486 women with breast cancer and validated our findings in a set of 516 patients from different hospitals.
resultsColocalization of immune cells with cancer cells was significantly associated with a disease-specific survival benefit for all breast cancers combined. In HER2-positive subtypes, the prognostic value of immune-cancer cell colocalization was highly significant and exceeded those of known clinical variables. Furthermore, colocalization was a significant predictive factor for long-term outcome following chemotherapy and radiotherapy in HER2 and Luminal A subtypes, independent of and stronger than all known clinical variables.
conclusionsOur study demonstrates how ecological methods applied to the tumor microenvironment using routine histology can provide reproducible, quantitative biomarkers for identifying high-risk breast cancer patients. We found that the clinical value of immune-cancer interaction patterns is highly subtype-specific but substantial and independent to known clinicopathologic variables that mostly focused on cancer itself. Our approach can be developed into computer-assisted prediction based on histology samples that are already routinely collected.
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