Quantifying Cellular Microenvironments with Spatial Analysis

The rapidly evolving field of multiplexed imaging is revealing increasingly complex patterns of cellular positioning and cell-cell interactions with important roles in both cellular- and tissue-level physiology.

In this webinar, Dr. Michael Gerner, assistant professor at University of Washington, and Dr. Caleb Stolzfus, postdoctoral scholar at University of Washington, will describe a spatial analysis toolbox capable of leveraging these information-rich datasets: the histo-cytometric multidimensional analysis pipeline (CytoMAP). CytoMAP incorporates multiple approaches for data clustering, positional correlation, dimensionality reduction, and 2D/3D region reconstruction to reveal features of cellular heterogeneity, quantify patterning of these cells across tissues, and identify large-scale principles of tissue organization.

In the first half of the webinar, Gerner and Stolzfus will introduce the tools available in CytoMAP for high-dimensional image analysis and demonstrate the utility of CytoMAP in studying the microanatomy of phenotypically complex immune cell subsets in lymph nodes, organs with intricate cellular spatial patterning. In the second half of the webinar, Gerner and Stolzfus will present a live demonstration of the analysis workflow showing how CytoMAP can be used to understand tissue structure and reveal features of tissue organization in spatially resolved datasets.

Key learning objectives:

• Learn about the various spatial analysis tools available in CytoMAP
• Understand the data pre-processing steps: cellular characteristics, surface objects, and data formats
• Understand the tools in CytoMAP for quantifying cellular heterogeneity and positioning
• Learn how to perform advanced spatial statistics with CytoMAP: regions and tissue organization