用常规病理切片预测肿瘤微环境通路活性,揭示异质性
Digital Modeling of Spatial Pathway Activity from Histology Reveals Tumor Microenvironment Heterogeneity
- 基于病理图像特征,直接预测微尺度(55-100μm)通路活性
- TGFβ通路预测准确率最高,在87%-88%病例中呈现肿瘤与正常组织对比
- 线性与非线性模型表现相当,表明图像特征与通路活性关系接近线性
空间转录组学(ST)可同时映射组织形态与空间分辨的基因表达,为研究肿瘤微环境异质性提供独特机遇。本文提出一种计算框架,直接从苏木精-伊红染色(H&E)病理图像中预测微尺度(55-100 μm)分辨率下的通路活性。利用来自计算病理学基础模型的图像特征,发现TGFβ信号通路在三个独立的乳腺癌和肺癌ST数据集中预测最准确。在87%-88%的可靠预测案例中,所得TGFβ活性图显示了肿瘤区与邻近非肿瘤区的预期差异,符合TGFβ调控肿瘤微环境相互作用的已知功能。值得注意的是,线性与非线性预测模型性能相近,暗示图像特征与通路活性的关系可能主要呈线性,或非线性结构相对于测量噪声较小。结果表明,从常规病理切片提取的特征可恢复空间一致且生物学可解释的通路模式,为整合影像推断与空间转录组信息提供了可扩展策略。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables simultaneous mapping of tissue morphology and spatially resolved gene expression, offering unique opportunities to study tumor microenvironment heterogeneity. Here, we introduce a computational framework that predicts spatial pathway activity directly from hematoxylin-and-eosin-stained histology images at microscale resolution 55 and 100 um. Using image features derived from a computational pathology foundation model, we found that TGFb signaling was the most accurately predicted pathway across three independent breast and lung cancer ST datasets. In 87-88% of reliably predicted cases, the resulting spatial TGFb activity maps reflected the expected contrast between tumor and adjacent non-tumor regions, consistent with the known role of TGFb in regulating interactions within the tumor microenvironment. Notably, linear and nonlinear predictive models performed similarly, suggesting that image features may relate to pathway activity in a predominantly linear fashion or that nonlinear structure is small relative to measurement noise. These findings demonstrate that features extracted from routine histopathology may recover spatially coherent and biologically interpretable pathway patterns, offering a scalable strategy for integrating image-based inference with ST information in tumor microenvironment studies.
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