Fig. 5: Niche characterisation: cell neighbourhoods and local vessel density.

a Cell distributions at day 526 from a single representative simulation. Zoomed-in insets are examples of a survival niche (S), an eradication niche (E) and a persistence niche (P). b Vessel density measure, ρ(x), over the domain, for the static vessel distribution \({{{\mathcal{V}}}}\). Here \(\hat{\alpha }=0.1\). Boxes tracing the same regions considered in (a), show higher ρ in the survival niche compared to the eradication niche, and lowest ρ in the persistence niche. c Distributions of different cell types of neighbours to cancer cells, over the t ∈ [0, 590] days window, for the same 30 simulations as Fig. 4. Distributions of average cancer, passive stroma and activated stroma neighbours of cancer cells with standard errors in each niche are shown.