Fig. 1: Overview of the study of melanoma patients using imaging mass cytometry (IMC) and characteristics of cell composition in tumor microenvironments.

a Workflow of IMC images acquisition from melanoma patients and data analyses. b Heatmap of mean values of scaled protein expression per cell type identified by unsupervised clustering (FlowSOM and Phenograph) for a total of 662,266 single cells. The boxplots on the right depicting the cell proportion of each IMC image. Each boxplot is shown with the median (the center line), interquartile range (IQR), and 1.5 times the IQR (whiskers), with outliers exceeding 1.5 times the IQR (n = 158 images). c Stack bars showing averaged cell percentage in images in the invasive margin (IM, top) and core tumor (CT, bottom) from responders and nonresponders, colored by four main cell types (left) and 20 cell subtypes (right). d Representative multichannel IMC images (ROI: region of interest) from one responder (left) and one nonresponder (right). Vimentin (magenta) and collagen I (white) were used to portrait the structure of the tissue.