Immunotherapy has gathered momentum in the advanced generation of cancer therapeutics. Many unresectable resistant tumor subtypes are ideal candidates for immunotherapy; however, the efficacy is limited because of heterogeneity of both malignant cells and non-malignant cells of the tumor microenvironment, including stromal and immune cells. The success of immunotherapy is largely dependent on the population of individual immune cell types between patients of the same tumor subtype, and the expression of biomarkers that are expressed by the components of the immune system. Hence, it is imperative to first identify the components of the immune system, visualize these populations in the tumor microenvironment, and then devise specifically targeted immunotherapies. In this review, we have outlined strategies to characterize the cellular components of the immune system with clinically relevant imaging modalities. The importance of high dimensional analyses including mass cytometry and unbiased single-cell RNA sequence analysis in visualizing the ideal candidates for immunotherapy has been discussed. This review stresses the importance of immuno-imaging as a means to further develop targeted immunotherapies for cancer.

免疫疗法已在先进的癌症疗法中积聚了动力。许多不可切除的抗药性肿瘤亚型是免疫治疗的理想候选药物。然而，由于肿瘤微环境的恶性细胞和非恶性细胞（包括基质细胞和免疫细胞）的异质性，其功效是有限的。免疫疗法的成功很大程度上取决于相同肿瘤亚型患者之间个体免疫细胞类型的数量，以及免疫系统各成分表达的生物标志物的表达。因此，必须首先确定免疫系统的组成部分，在肿瘤微环境中可视化这些种群，然后设计专门针对性的免疫疗法。在这篇评论中，我们概述了利用临床相关成像方式表征免疫系统细胞成分的策略。讨论了包括大规模流式细胞术和无偏的单细胞RNA序列分析在内的高维分析在可视化免疫疗法理想候选者中的重要性。这篇评论强调了免疫成像作为进一步开发针对癌症的靶向免疫疗法的手段的重要性。