Inflammation
and T-cell infiltration are important prognostic biomarkers for cancer
immunotherapies.1 Current clinical practice relies on histological
assessment of tissue biopsies which is invasive and prone to sampling errors. Temporal
diffusion spectroscopy, particularly with short effective diffusion times can
estimate cell sizes.2,3 Lymphocytes have small diameters compared to
typical tumor cells. We therefore tested the ability of temporal diffusion spectroscopy
to differentiate between pellets of tumor cells mixed with a varying amount of
activated lymphocytes. We observed clearly separable diffusion characteristics for
samples containing > 20% lymphocytes indicating that this approach may have
potential to quantify inflammation in highly inflamed tissues.
