DIMPLE: An R package to quantify, visualize, and model spatial cellular interactions from multiplex imaging with distance matrices

Abstract

A major challenge in the spatial analysis of multiplex imaging (MI) data is choosing how to measure cellular spatial interactions and how to relate them to patient outcomes. Existing methods to quantify cell-cell interactions do not scale to the rapidly evolving technical landscape, where both the number of unique cell types and the number of images in a dataset may be large. We propose a scalable analytical framework and accompanying R package, DIMPLE, to quantify, visualize, and model cell-cell interactions in the TME. By applying DIMPLE to publicly available MI data, we uncover statistically significant associations between image-level measures of cell-cell interactions and patient-level covariates.