NeST: nested hierarchical structure identification in spatial transcriptomic data

SANTO: a coarse-to-fine alignment and stitching method for spatial omics

With the flourishing of spatial omics technologies, alignment and stitching of slices becomes indispensable to decipher a holistic view of 3D molecular profile. However, existing alignment and stitching methods are unpractical to process large-scale and image-based spatial omics dataset due to extreme time consumption and unsatisfactory accuracy. Here we propose SANTO, a coarse-to-fine method targeting alignment and stitching tasks for spatial omics. SANTO firstly rapidly supplies reasonable spatial positions of two slices and identifies the overlap region. Then, SANTO refines the positions of two slices by considering spatial and omics patterns. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of SANTO over existing methods. Specifically, SANTO stitches cross-platform slices for breast cancer samples, enabling integration of complementary features to synergistically explore tumor microenvironment. SANTO is then applied to 3D-to-3D spatiotemporal alignment to study development of mouse embryo. Furthermore, SANTO enables cross-modality alignment of spatial transcriptomic and epigenomic data to understand complementary interactions.

MENDER: fast and scalable tissue structure identification in spatial omics data

Tissue structure identification is a crucial task in spatial omics data analysis, for which increasingly complex models, such as Graph Neural Networks and Bayesian networks, are employed. However, whether increased model complexity can effectively lead to improved performance is a notable question in the field. Inspired by the consistent observation of cellular neighborhood structures across various spatial technologies, we propose Multi-range cEll coNtext DEciphereR (MENDER), for tissue structure identification. Applied on datasets of 3 brain regions and a whole-brain atlas, MENDER, with biology-driven design, offers substantial improvements over modern complex models while automatically aligning labels across slices, despite using much less running time than the second-fastest. MENDER's identification power allows the uncovering of previously overlooked spatial domains that exhibit strong associations with brain aging. MENDER's scalability makes it freely appliable on a million-level brain spatial atlas. MENDER's discriminative power enables the differentiation of breast cancer patient subtypes obscured by single-cell analysis.