Charting Cellular Networks in the Tumor Microenvironment: Graph Visualizations in Highly-Multiplexed Breast Cancer Tissue

Lara Elvevåg, Youssef Wally, Benjamin Ricaud, Vladan Milosevic, Elisabeth Wetzer

Keywords: Imaging Mass Cytometry, Breast Cancer, Graph construction, Interpretability, Graph Neural Networks

TL;DR: Interactive graph visualizations reveal cell communication patterns in the tumor microenvironment and generate graph representations that can be leveraged by GNNs to relate cellular interactions to patient outcomes.

Abstract: The tumor microenvironment, composed of diverse interacting cells, plays a pivotal role in cancer progression by influencing tumor growth, immune evasion, and therapeutic outcomes. In this ongoing work, we propose the use of interactive graph visualizations as a versatile tool for exploring and analyzing biological data to unravel cell communication patterns in the tumor microenvironment and identify graph representations of the multiplex data, which can subsequently be leveraged by graph neural networks to contextualize cell interactions with patient outcomes.

Serve As Reviewer: ~Youssef_Wally1

Submission Number: 18