Fig. 1

Assessment of CD8 + T cells in patient samples. (a and b) analysis of CD8 + T cells in stroma and epithelium of the primary tumor of 19 patients (a) and the PM lesions of 37 patients. The graphs illustrate the number of CD8 + T-cells normalized to the corresponding area of stroma or epithelium. (c).The bar graph shows the distribution of intraepithelial CD8 + T-cells normalized by area in PM-lesions among the 37 patients. The dotted line indicates the median and divide the cohort into CD8 + T-cell high and low. (d) The scanned histological slide of PM lesions. The upper left picture presents an example with high CD8 + T-cell infiltration and the corresponding HALO classified picture below. The left upper example is CD8 + T-cell low. The classified pictures show the different areas of the tumor (green: stroma, violet: necrosis, red: intraepithelial, yellow: white space). DFS (e) and OS (f) based on intraepithelial CD8 + T-cell counts of PM lesions. 18 patients belong to the CD8 + T-cell high group and 19 patients to the CD8 + T-cell low group. DFS (g) and OS (h) based on the stroma content and CD8 + T-cell distribution. 15 patients with a CD8 + T-cell high PM lesion were associated with low stromal content (continuous line), 9 patients with a CD8 + T-cell low PM-lesion had a rich stroma (fine dotted line),10 patients with a CD8 + T-cell low PMlesion had a poor stroma (bold dotted line) and 3 patients with a CD8 + T-cell high PM-lesion were stroma rich (dotted line). Error bars represent the median and the lines the interquartile range. Each dot represents a patient. **** = p ≤ 0.0001, *** = p ≤ 0.001, ** = = p ≤ 0.01, * = p ≤ 0.05, ns = p > 0.05.