THU500 Geospatial Analysis To Quantify Spatial Heterogeneity Of Tumor Microenvironment

Disclosure: J. Yoo: None. C. Mitra: None. Y. Yue: None. A. Soliman: None. Z. Madak Erdogan: None. Metabolic heterogeneity, a concept describing distinct differences in nutrient metabolism within the cells of a healthy or diseased tissue, is a common challenge in development and cancer research. Current methods, such as histology and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), cannot visualize nutrient uptake into single cells, making it difficult to understand the heterogeneity that affects cellular growth and metabolism. Visium Spatial Transcriptomics, a method that shows regional gene expression, is emerging as a powerful spatial analysis tool, and we aim to integrate this transcriptomic method with other biologically relevant datasets to highlight the importance of cell-microenvironment interactions. We propose to leverage geostatistical tools to model the multivariate covariance structure of genes expression profiles to allow: 1) understanding of their spatial characteristics and covariance changes under certain conditions (e.g. drug treatment or damage), 2) using these covariance structures to simulate synthetic samples at a scale sufficient to train the state of art neural network architectures, and 3) incorporating spatial awareness directly in the machine learning/deep learning models by enriching the spatial transcriptomics data using distance proximity functions. We will quantify the tumor microenvironment spatial heterogeneity using different approaches. First, we will analyze the degree of spatial auto-correlation to estimate the ranges of spatial heterogeneity within a tumor. We also plan to quantify the degree of anisotropy to identify if the tumor heterogeneity is happening along specific axis. Different local clustering indicators will be also calculated, such as the Getis-Ord (Gi*) statistic and Local Moran's I to identify the prevalence of hot and cold spots in the tumor. These hot and cold spots will be used to segment the tumor area into sub-regions and further quantify the local heterogeneity with a single tumor. We hypothesize that transcriptional heterogeneity reflects phenotypic differences in different regions of healthy or diseased tissue, rendering cells in certain regions to display a differential response to external stimuli (e.g. diet or drugs). Integration of multiple information (e.g. retrospective patient data) with different spatial heterogeneity indicators identified from the geospatial analyses could aid in identification of patients who are resistant to cancer therapies and further advance personalized therapy. Presentation: Thursday, June 15, 2023