Assessment of Anti-tumor Immune Response in Colorectal Carcinomas from Whole Slide Images

摘要

Digital pathology is considered as one of the most promising techniques for diagnostic medicine, enabling to automate different steps in the visual interpretation process of biological tissues. In order to assess treatment efficiency in colorectal carcinomas, we developed a methodology to characterize the anti-tumor immune response based on the analysis of Whole Slide Images. This method relies both on marker separation and lymphocyte detection image processing modules, coupled to a novel strategy to locally quantify the lymphocyte infiltration relative to the tumor boundary, according to a specific clinical protocol. The quantitative assessments obtained are already used in a pre-clinical analysis of tumor evolution and improve repeatability of clinical studies.