Joint imputation and deconvolution of gene expression across spatial transcriptomics platforms

Abstract

Spatially resolved transcriptomics (SRT) technologies measure gene expression across thousands of spatial locations within a tissue slice. Multiple SRT technologies are currently available and others are in active development, with each technology having varying spatial resolution (subcellular, single-cell, or multicellular regions), gene coverage (targeted vs. whole-transcriptome), and sequencing depth per location. For example, the widely used 10x Genomics Visium platform measures whole transcriptomes from multiple-cell-sized spots, whereas the 10x Genomics Xenium platform measures a few hundred genes at subcellular resolution. A number of studies apply multiple SRT technologies to slices that originate from the same biological tissue. Integration of data from different SRT technologies can overcome limitations of the individual technologies, enabling the imputation of expression from unmeasured genes in targeted technologies and/or the deconvolution of admixed expression from technologies with lower spatial resolution. Here, we introduce Spatial Integration for Imputation and Deconvolution (SIID), an algorithm to reconstruct a latent spatial gene expression matrix from a pair of observations from different SRT technologies. SIID leverages a spatial alignment and uses a joint nonnegative factorization model to accurately impute missing gene expression and infer gene expression signatures of cell types from admixed SRT data. In simulations involving paired SRT data sets from different technologies (e.g., Xenium and Visium), SIID shows superior performance in reconstructing spot-to-cell-type assignments, recovering cell type–specific gene expression and imputing missing data compared to contemporary tools. When applied to real-world 10x Xenium-Visium pairs from human breast and colon cancer tissues, SIID achieves highest performance in imputing holdout gene expression.