Spatial heterogeneity of cancer associated protein expression in immunohistochemically stained images as an improved prognostic biomarker

The identification of new tumor biomarkers for patient stratification before therapy, for monitoring of disease progression, and for characterization of tumor biology plays a crucial role in cancer research. The status of these biomarkers is mostly scored manually by a pathologist and such scores typically, do not consider the spatial heterogeneity of the protein’s expression in the tissue. Using advanced image analysis methods, marker expression can be determined quantitatively with high accuracy and reproducibility on a per-cell level. To aggregate such per-cell marker expressions on a patient level, the expression values for single cells are usually averaged for the whole tissue. However, averaging neglects the spatial heterogeneity of the marker expression in the tissue. We present two novel approaches for quantitative scoring of spatial marker expression heterogeneity. The first approach is based on a co-occurrence analysis of the marker expression in neighboring cells. The second approach accounts for the local variability of the protein’s expression by tiling the tissue with a regular grid and assigning local spatial heterogeneity phenotypes per tile. We apply our novel scores to quantify the spatial expression of four different membrane markers, i.e., HER2, CMET, CD44, and EGFR in immunohistochemically (IHC) stained tissue sections of colorectal cancer patients. We evaluate the prognostic relevance of our spatial scores in this cohort and show that the spatial heterogeneity scores clearly outperform the marker expression average as a prognostic factor (CMET: p-value=0.01 vs. p-value=0.3).