title: A model of the spatial tumour heterogeneity in colorectal adenocarcinoma tissue.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  There have been great advancements in the field of digital pathology. The surge in development of analytical methods for such data makes it crucial to develop benchmark synthetic datasets for objectively validating and comparing these methods. In addition, developing a spatial model of the tumour microenvironment can aid our understanding of the underpinning laws of tumour heterogeneity.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We propose a model of the healthy and cancerous colonic crypt microenvironment. Our model is designed to generate synthetic histology image data with parameters that allow control over cancer grade, cellularity, cell overlap ratio, image resolution, and objective level.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first model to simulate histology image data at sub-cellular level for healthy and cancerous colon tissue, where the cells have different compartments and are organised to mimic the microenvironment of tissue in situ rather than dispersed cells in a cultured environment. Qualitative and quantitative validation has been performed on the model results demonstrating good similarity to the real data. The simulated data could be used to validate techniques such as image restoration, cell and crypt segmentation, and cancer grading.
authors.affiliation: Department of Systems Biology, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. v.n.kovacheva@warwick.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Violeta N
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5335-2403
authors.initials: VN
authors.lastname: Kovacheva
authors.affiliation: Department of HistopathologyUniversity Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire, Coventry, CV2 2DX, UK.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Snead
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.|Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar.
authors.forename: Nasir M
authors.initials: NM
authors.lastname: Rajpoot
mesh_terms: D000230:Adenocarcinoma / Q000473:pathology*; D003106:Colon / Q000166:cytology*; D003110:Colonic Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004801:Eosine Yellowish-(YS) / Q000737:chemistry; D006416:Hematoxylin / Q000737:chemistry; D006801:Humans; D059016:Tumor Microenvironment
chemical_list: D004801:Eosine Yellowish-(YS); D006416:Hematoxylin
keywords: Colorectal tissue architecture; Digital pathology; Histology image modelling