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SPoTLIghT, a computational framework to extract interpretable features of the spatial distribution of multiple cell types by combining unannotated pathology images with bulk transcriptomics.

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Spatial Profiling of Tumors by Leveraging Imaging and Transcriptomics (SPoTLIghT)

Our pipeline, SPoTLIghT, as presented in our paper, can be used to derive spatial graph-based interpretable features from H&E slides and is available as a Nextflow pipeline.

The pipeline comprises the following modules:

  1. Extracting histopathological features
  2. Deconvolution of bulkRNAseq data
  3. Building a multi-task cell type model to predict cell type abundances on a tile-level
  4. Predicting tile-level cell type abundances using the multi-task models
  5. Compute spatial features using the tile-level cell type abundances

The training of the cell type models have been perfomed using fresh frozen (FF) slides for the TCGA-SKCM dataset (melanoma) as described in the paper. The trained models are provided here.

See also the figures below.

Software

  • Docker: 27.2.0
  • Apptainer: 1.0.2
  • Nextflow: 24.04.4 build 5917

These were the versions used for testing the pipeline.

Set up

  1. Create apptainer/singularity containers from Docker images:
# 1. save docker as tar or tar.gz (compressed)
docker save joank23/spotlight -o spotlight.tar.gz
# 2. build apptainer (.sif) from docker (.tar)
apptainer build spotlight.sif docker-archive:spotlight.tar.gz

# 1. save docker as tar or tar.gz (compressed)
docker save joank23/immunedeconvr -o immunedeconvr.tar.gz
# 2. build apptainer (.sif) from docker (.tar)
apptainer build immunedeconvr.sif docker-archive:immunedeconvr.tar.gz
  1. Download retrained models to extract the histopathological features, available from Fu et al., Nat Cancer, 2020 (Retrained_Inception_v4). Once you unzip the folder, extract the files to the data/checkpoint/Retrained_Inception_v4/ folder.

Quick Start

  1. Building cell type models
  2. Extracting spatial features using SKCM cell type models

For more information, please read docs/README.md

Citing SPoTLIghT

If you use SPoTLIghT, please cite our paper:

Lapuente-Santana, Ó., Kant, J. & Eduati, F. Integrating histopathology and transcriptomics for spatial tumor microenvironment profiling in a melanoma case study. npj Precis. Onc. 8, 254 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41698-024-00749-w

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SPoTLIghT, a computational framework to extract interpretable features of the spatial distribution of multiple cell types by combining unannotated pathology images with bulk transcriptomics.

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