Development of a scoring function for comparing simulated and experimental tumor spheroids
Fig 2
Visualization of cell based features extracted from simulation data for four different phenotypes.
a) Cell density distribution. Shown is, averaged over all replicates of each phenotype, the fraction of cells within spherical layers around the spheroid center versus the radii of these layers. The “spherical” phenotype shows a steep drop at a radius of 150 μm, while the “deformed” and “disordered” phenotypes show a long-tailed distribution. The “spherical with far gaslikes” phenotype behaves similar to the “spherical” phenotype, except for a non-zero density above 175 μm. b) Gaslike cell distribution. Shown are the average fractions of gaslike cells according to Eq 1 versus their normalized average distance to the spheroid center. The fraction of gaslikes exhibited by the “spherical”, “spherical with far gaslikes” and “deformed” phenotypes is similar, but the distance from the spheroid center is far greater for the “spherical with far gaslikes” phenotype. The “disordered” phenotype on the other hand contains many cells classified as gaslikes across the entire spheroid volume. Their normalized average distance from the center evens out to a value slightly above 1. c) Voronoi cell volume distribution. Shown are histograms of the average Voronoi cell volumes found in the four phenotypes. The “spherical” phenotype shows a sharp peak around a volume of 4000 μm3, and a smaller peak around a volume of 2000 μm3. The “spherical with far gaslikes” and “deformed” phenotypes show a similar behavior, with a slightly more pronounced tail towards larger volumes. Finally, the “disordered” phenotype shows volumes distributed over a wide range. The range between volumes of 1500 μm3 and 5000 μm3 is magnified on the right to highlight the differences between phenotypes in the two peaks.