Fig. 4: Proposed quantitative measures of infiltration.
From: An integrated framework for quantifying immune-tumour interactions in a 3D co-culture model
a Schematic illustrating the two-stage algorithm for computing TIS, the segmentation-based measure of the degree of trafficking. a1 Raw image data of the green and red channels, where green represents the spheroid cells and red represents the immune cells. a2 Red channel of the original image. a3 Green channel of the original image. a4 and a5 Enhancement of the red and green channels by noise reduction. a6 and a7 Segmented immune cell (a6) and tumour (a7) regions shaded by red and green intensity, respectively. a8 Intersection of the segmented tumour and immune cell regions which corresponds to the region where TIS has values greater than zero. a9 Pixels in the identified region shaded by the value of TIS corresponding to the red/green value. b Illustration of the classification of pixels based on a k-means classifier that partitions the red–green space into four disjoint classes. This classification is used to compute the TIC trafficking measure that corresponds to the number of pixels classified as immune cells that are surrounded by pixels that are classified as tumour cells.
