Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

The cellular ecosystem is a complex environment hosting a collection of diverse cell populations that engage in dynamic interactions. In the ecosystem, the types of cells and how the cells interact influence their growth, reproduction, survival, and chance of becoming malignant. Previous studies have investigated the cellular ecosystems by isolating single cells from human tissues but not being able to record where the cells were originally located in the tissue. Without preserving the tissue structure, we cannot study the organisation and the interactions between cells which are direct representations of the state of tissue. To address this, innovative spatial technologies have been developed to preserve the spatial context by incorporating a new dimension of space by recording cells with imaging techniques. With the new platforms, my research will be to investigate how integrating spatial information can improve our understanding of cellular and interaction diversity in the ecosystem by the use of computational methods. As deciphering spatial data is a non-trivial task to convert images to interpretable data, we will first introduce a streamlined framework for spatial data analysis by developing and employing various machine learning techniques. Through the use of our framework, we will study the types of interactions between immune and tumour cells that can be indicative of transformation in Follicular lymphoma (FL) data. We will also characterise the spatial relationship between stromal, immune, and epithelial cells in normal breast tissue. Altogether, my work will contribute a computational workflow for spatial analysis and explore how interactions between cells influence normal and malignant tissue development.