Topological quantification of colorectal cancer tissue structure

SergioSerrano de Haro Ivanez

University of Oxford

"Topological quantification of colorectal cancer tissue structure"

A hallmark of colorectal cancer is the structural disruption of the colonic tissue, a process correlated with disease progression. Intestinal crypts, glands essential for homeostasis, lose their tubular morphology - and function - due to uncontrolled cell proliferation and tissue invasion. Evaluating this deterioration in biopsied samples is critical for both patient diagnosis and prognosis. Histopathological methods are essential for assessing colorectal cancer status, but their precision and reproducibility can be improved. Spatial biology provides a mathematical framework to analyse the structural properties of biological data; in this work, we apply techniques from topological data analysis and network science to quantify architectural changes in colorectal cancer progression. Using cell point clouds derived from immunohistochemistry imaging, we construct cell networks that encode topological tissue features. We employ these networks to segment large, imaged samples into smaller, biologically meaningful regions of interest that preserve tissue architecture. We compare the performance of our approach to conventional segmentation methods such as quadrat division. Within these segmented regions, we further employ methods from persistent homology to quantify tissue structure, with the long-term goal of identifying novel biomarkers of disease progression.
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