Fig. 5: Vessel distance to metastases, median vessel surface area intercept and diameter are correlated with polychromatic metastases.

a–c Representative lung SVT metastases encasing or near to blood vessels. Scale bar 100 μm. d Median distances of monochromatic and polychromatic metastases (relative to metastasis size) to nearest vessel in IV-injected and MFP-injected mice. Paired t test, *P = 0.010600 and 0.047755, respectively. e–g Median surface area intersect of monochromatic and polychromatic metastases touching blood vessels in IV-injected and MFP-injected mice. Median surface area intercept of metastases with volume e 100,000 μm³ to 1,000,000 μm³ (100–1000 cells, small), f 1,000,000 μm³ to 10,000,000 μm³ (1000–10,000 cells, medium), g above 10,000,000 μm³ (>10,000 cells, large). h Median nearest vessel diameter of monochromatic and polychromatic metastases in IV-injected and MFP-injected mice. Paired t test, *P = 0.040485, ns not significant. All box plots show the median and interquartile range (IQR), with lines representing 1.5*IQR. n = 5 mice for IV and n = 4 mice for MFP from 4 independent experiments, except for (g), where metastases > 10,000,000 μm³ were not present in every mouse. In (g) the number of data points is as follows: IV monochromatic (n = 4 mice), IV polychromatic (n = 5 mice), MFP monochromatic (n = 2 mice), and MFP polychromatic (n = 3 mice). The number of monochromatic metastases analysed for IV-injected mice ranged from 384 to 5300, and for MFP-injected mice ranged from 1057 to 3196. The number of polychromatic metastases analysed for IV-injected mice ranged from 21 to 419, and for MFP-injected mice ranged from 58 to 219. In (e–g), subsets of metastases were analysed based on metastasis volume. For one experiment, mice from the IV and MFP groups were injected in parallel (highlighted by the burgundy-coloured dots).