Cell Type Assignments for Spatial Transcriptomics Data

Abstract

MotivationRecent advancements in fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) techniques enable them to concurrently obtain information on the location and gene expression of single cells. A key question in the initial analysis of such spatial transcriptomics data is the assignment of cell types. To date, most studies used methods that only rely on the expression levels of the genes in each cell for such assignments. To fully utilize the data and to improve the ability to identify novel sub-types we developed a new method, FICT, which combines both expression and neighborhood information when assigning cell types. ResultsFICT optimizes a probabilistic function that we formalize and for which we provide learning and inference algorithms. We used FICT to analyze both simulated and several real spatial transcriptomics data. As we show, FICT can accurately identify cell types and sub-types improving on expression only methods and other methods proposed for clustering spatial transcriptomics data. Some of the spatial sub-types identified by FICT provide novel hypotheses about the new functions for excitatory and inhibitory neurons. AvailabilityFICT is available at: https://github.com/haotianteng/FICT Contactzivbj@andrew.cmu.edu