- Motivation Hodgkin lymphoma is a tumor of the lymphatic system and represents one of the most frequent lymphoma in the Western world. It is characterized by Hodgkin cells and Reed-Sternberg cells, which exhibit a broad morphological spectrum. The cells are visualized by immunohistochemical staining of tissue sections. In pathology, tissue images are mainly manually evaluated, relying on the expertise and experience of pathologists. Computational quantification methods become more and more essential to evaluate tissue images. In particular, the distribution of cancer cells is of great interest.
Results Here, we systematically quantified and investigated cancer cell properties and their spatial neighborhood relations by applying statistical analyses to whole slide images of Hodgkin lymphoma and lymphadenitis, which describes a non-cancerous inflammation of the lymph node. We differentiated cells by their morphology and studied the spatial neighborhood relation of more than 400,000 immunohistochemically stained cells. We found that, according to their morphological features, the cells exhibited significant preferences for and aversions to cells of specific profiles as nearest neighbor. We quantified differences between Hodgkin lymphoma and lymphadenitis concerning the neighborhood relations of cells and the sizes of cells. The approach can easily be applied to other cancer types.
