BREAST CANCER REACTION-DIFFUSION FROM SPECTRAL-SPATIAL ANALYSIS IN IMMUNOHISTOCHEMISTRY - STEFANO PASETTO - MOFFITT CANCER CENTER AND RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Abstract
Cancer is a prevalent disease, and while many significant advances have been made, the ability to accurately predict how an individual tumor will grow – and ultimately respond to therapy – remains limited. Tumor growth and invasion destroy the natural biological architecture of cells organized in healthy tissues. Traditionally, signatures of this morphological transformation have been investigated and quantified using spatial statistics analyses. We develop a theoretical framework to connect spatial tissue analyses with tumor growth and invasion. We exploit spatial-spectral analyses to connect the morphological changes induced by the cancer growth, as observed in histopathological tissue slides, to the parameters in the reaction-diffusion equation expressing the growth and invasion. We compare power spectral density from the data-deduced two-point correlation function to the corresponding theoretical power distribution predicted by the reaction-diffusion equation. We find that a histopathological slide, taken at a single time-point – such as routinely collected from biopsies at cancer diagnosis – suffices to interpret disease dynamics into the framework of the reaction-diffusion equation. This novel approach may immediately inform clinical treatments.