Imaging Mass Cytometry™ (IMC™) is a vital tool that allows researchers to gain an appreciation of the role of heterogeneity in cell function and assess complex phenotypes and tumor-immune interactions in the tissue and tumor microenvironment. Gain a deeper understanding of the spatial environment to answer important translational and clinical research questions in the context of disease.

Karimi et al. applied imaging mass cytometry to characterize the immunological landscape of 139 high-grade glioma and 46 brain metastasis tumours from patients. Single-cell analysis of more than 1.1 million cells across 389 high-dimensional histopathology images enabled the spatial resolution of immune lineages and activation states, revealing differences in immune landscapes between primary tumours and brain metastases from diverse solid cancers. These analyses revealed cellular neighbourhoods associated with survival in patients with glioblastoma, which we leveraged to identify a unique population of myeloperoxidase (MPO)-positive macrophages associated with long-term survival. The findings provide insight into the biology of primary and metastatic brain tumours, reinforcing the value of integrating spatial resolution to single-cell datasets to dissect the microenvironmental contexture of cancer ¹⁾