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We are delighted to announce that one of the TIA Centre’s PhD students, Arwa Ali Al-Rubaian, officially defended their PhD viva last last week - congratulations Arwa!

Arwa’s research, was titled Algorithms for Growth Pattern Based-Analysis of Lung Adenocarcinoma Histology.

Lung Adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is a leading cause of cancer deaths and shows considerable variation in patient outcomes due to its complex histological, immune, and molecular diversity. Traditional computational pathology methods use global, pattern-agnostic representations that do not capture the structured organization of tumor tissue. This thesis develops new, pattern-aware computational approaches to address this gap.

We introduce two digital pathology models: CellOMaps for classifying growth patterns and GRIL-GNN for predicting tumor mutational burden. Moreover, we introduce a novel digital biomarker, GPS-TILs, for patient stratification. This work has been published in various venues, including The Journal of Pathology, Computers in Biology and Medicine, ISBI conference, and MIUA conference.

Overall, we demonstrate that integrating spatial and pattern-aware analysis improves the interpretation of morphological, immune, and molecular signals in LUAD. The approaches proposed here provide a framework for more precise, clinically relevant computational pathology, with potential applications to other cancers characterized by complex tissue structure.

We were also pleased and grateful to welcome Khalid Niazi, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Pathology, The Ohio State University as the external examiner.

We are grateful to King Saud University and The Cultural Bureau, Embassy of Saudi Arabia for contributing funding to Arwa’s PhD.