title: What algorithm should be used for finding spatial correlation between images?
body: <p>I am working on analyzing a data set and I was wondering what would be the most statistically valid method of demonstrating that there is a strong spatial correlation between points in different images.</p>
  
  <p>My data set has about 50 pairs of images of cancerous tissue samples. The first image in each pair shows the locations of gold nanoparticles, and the second image shows the locations of the blood vessels in the same tissue sample. By looking at the images it is easy to see that the locations of the nanoparticles match up well with the blood vessels, but I would like to prove this statistically in the paper. This is an important point because it demonstrates that the nanoparticles bind specifically to the cancerous areas instead of the normal tissue.</p>
  
  <p>I have been looking at different statistics such as a simple linear correlation or something more sophisticated like the Moran's I statistic. However, I haven't found anything that would work well for correlation between images.</p>