Fig. 5: Analysis of the prognostic relevance of tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs) and germinal centers (GCs) in test and validation cohorts (n = 836).

Overall survival was compared between patient groups by Kaplan–Meier curves and log-rank test. a TLS-high groups were defined as above median TLS density calculated from whole tumor cohorts of each tumor type for manually annotated (GT) and predicted TLSs (HN). Calculated median manual TLS densities (TLS/cm2) were: clear cell renal cancer (KIRC) 0.437, muscle invasive bladder cancer (BLCA) 1.665, lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) 4.862. Calculated median predicted TLS densities (TLS/cm2) were: KIRC 0.614, BLCA 2.439, LUSC 6.78. b Groups were defined by median GC densities of whole cohorts of each tumor type for manually annotated (GT) and predicted TLSs (HN). Due to the low frequency of GCs, this threshold corresponded to GC-negative vs GC-positive tumors in all cohorts. GT, ground truth; HN, HookNet-TLS.