A0670
Title: Bayesian integrative region segmentation in spatially resolved transcriptomic studies
Authors: Yinqiao Yan - Renmin University of China (China) [presenting]
Abstract: The spatially resolved transcriptomic study is a recently developed biological experiment that can measure gene expressions and retain spatial information simultaneously, opening a new avenue to characterize fine-grained tissue structures. A nonparametric Bayesian method, named BINRES, is proposed to carry out the region segmentation for a tissue section by integrating all three types of data generated during the study: gene expressions, spatial coordinates, and the histology image. BINRES is able to capture more subtle regions than existing statistical partitioning models that only partially make use of the three data modes and is more interpretable than neural-network-based region segmentation approaches. Specifically, due to a nonparametric spatial prior, BINRES does not require a prespecified region number and can learn it automatically. BINRES also combines the image and the gene expressions in the Bayesian consensus clustering framework and thus flexibly adjusts their label alignment contribution weights in a data-adaptive manner. A computationally scalable extension is developed for large-scale studies. Both simulation studies and the real application to three mouse spatial transcriptomic datasets demonstrate that BINRES outperforms the competing methods and easily achieves the uncertainty quantification of the integrative partition.
