Histology-informed spatial domain identification through multi-view graph convolutional networks

by Huihui Zhang, Jiaxing Chang, Zirong Li, Yue Sun, Pinli Hu, Haoxiu Wang, Hang Yang, Yonglin Ren, Xingtan Zhang, Zehua Chen, Kok Wai Wong, Haojing Shao Identifying spatial domains is crucial in spatial transcriptomics, yet effectively integrating gene expression, spatial location, and histology remains challenging. We present STESH, a Spatial Transcriptomics clustering method that combines Expression, Spatial information and Histology. STESH extracts histological features using a convolutional neural network and generates expression, histology, spatial, and collaborative convolution modules for a multi-view graph convolutional network with a decoder and attention mechanism. We evaluated STESH on multiple tissue types and technology platforms. STESH consistently outperformed ten state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior clustering accuracy with the highest scores in adjusted Rand index, normalized mutual information, and Fowlkes-Mallows index.