  Understanding the impact of tumor biology on the composition of nearby cells
often requires characterizing the impact of biologically distinct tumor
regions. Biomarkers have been developed to label biologically distinct tumor
regions, but challenges arise because of differences in the spatial extent and
distribution of differentially labeled regions. In this work, we present a
framework for systematically investigating the impact of distinct tumor regions
on cells near the tumor borders, accounting their cross spatial distributions.
We apply the framework to multiplex immunohistochemistry (mIHC) studies of
pancreatic cancer and show its efficacy in demonstrating how biologically
different tumor regions impact the immune response in the tumor
microenvironment. Furthermore, we show that the proposed framework can be
extended to largescale whole slide image analysis.
