DeepST: identifying spatial domains in spatial transcriptomics by deep learning

Recent advances in spatial transcriptomics (ST) have brought unprecedented opportunities to understand tissue organization and function in spatial context. However, it is still challenging to precisely dissect spatial domains with similar gene expression and histology in situ. Here, we present DeepST, an accurate and universal deep learning framework to identify spatial domains, which performs better than the existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmarking datasets of the human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Further testing on a breast cancer ST dataset, we showed that DeepST can dissect spatial domains in cancer tissue at a finer scale. Moreover, DeepST can achieve not only effective batch integration of…

• NN
  National Natural Science Foundation of China

  Awards: 61822108, 62032007