Speaker
Description
A hallmark of colorectal cancer is the progressive deterioration of the colonic tissue architecture. Intestinal crypts – tubular epithelial glands essential for homeostasis – gradually lose their characteristic morphology and function due to uncontrolled cell proliferation and tissue invasion. Quantifying this disruption in biopsied samples is critical for both patient diagnosis and prognosis.
Spatial biology offers a mathematical and computational framework for analysing tissue organisation. In this work, we combine techniques from topological data analysis and network science to quantify structural changes associated with colorectal cancer progression. Using cell point clouds extracted from immunohistochemistry imaging, we construct cell networks that encode topological features of tissue structure. We use these networks to partition large, imaged samples into smaller, biologically meaningful regions of interest that preserve local architectural information. Within these segmented regions, we apply methods from persistent homology to quantify multiscale structural properties of tissue. Our results reveal topological signatures that correlate with tumour progression and describe a continuum of architectural changes from healthy to cancerous samples.
