Tumor Landscape Analysis: An Ecologically Informed Framework to Understand Tumor Microenvironments

Tumors are spatially complex and ecologically dynamic systems shaped by evolutionary pressures, tissue architecture, and cellular interactions within the tumor microenvironment. To capture this complexity, we developed the Tumor Landscape Analysis (TLA) pipeline, a computational framework that applies principles from landscape ecology and spatial statistics to quantitatively characterize tumor spatial heterogeneity. TLA integrates spatially resolved pathology data, including whole-cell, point-based, and region-level formats, and computes multiscale metrics to assess cell distributions, neighborhood relationships, and tissue-level organization.

The framework leverages ecological indices such as the Morisita-Horn index, Ripley’s H function, and Shannon diversity to quantify intercellular proximity, spatial clustering, and diversity. It also introduces the concept of local microenvironments (LMEs), data-driven ecological niches defined by local cell-type abundance and spatial uniformity, enabling unsupervised and reproducible classification of tumor regions. Complementary fragmentation metrics, including patch density, shape complexity, and interspersion, provide further insight into spatial disorganization and emergent tissue architecture.

TLA is agnostic to imaging modality and biological context, supporting broad applicability across tumor types and sample formats. By translating complex tissue architectures into interpretable spatial metrics, the pipeline enables integrative analyses that link spatial ecology to clinical and molecular phenotypes. This approach facilitates a deeper understanding of how spatial features contribute to tumor progression, therapeutic resistance, and clinical outcomes, offering new opportunities for precision oncology rooted in spatial systems biology.