PO.BCS01.12 · 生物信息与计算
SOMaC:一个可解释、可泛化的框架,用于整合与聚类多模态空间组学以解析癌症中的细胞状态和免疫生态位
SOMaC: An interpretable and generalizable framework for integrating and clustering multimodal spatial omics to resolve cell states and immune niches in cancer
作者与单位 Authors & Affiliations
摘要 Abstract
中文摘要
空间组学技术,包括空间转录组学和多重空间蛋白质组学,为在完整肿瘤组织内表征细胞组织结构、微环境相互作用和功能状态提供了前所未有的机遇。然而,整合这些异质模态并解析空间上连贯的细胞状态和免疫生态位,仍是重大的计算挑战。现有方法通常孤立地分析单一模态,依赖于忽略高阶分子结构的基于表达的特征空间,并且对生物学发现的可解释性有限。
我们提出了 SOMaC,一个可解释、可泛化的框架,用于整合和聚类多模态空间组学数据,以解析癌症组织中的细胞和微环境架构。SOMaC 扩展了 OmicsMap 范式,将每个细胞或点位转化为类图像的分子相互作用图,编码基因或蛋白之间的成对相关性,从而捕获超越传统表达矩阵的调控结构。这些基于生物学的表征通过卷积自编码器、图神经网络和可学习中心聚类模块与空间拓扑联合整合,实现分子-空间嵌入用于域发现的端到端优化。
在涵盖九种人类和小鼠组织的 13 个基准数据集上(由 10x Visium、Xenium、Slide-seqV2、Stereo-seq、成像质谱流式细胞术(IMC)和 CODEX 进行分析),SOMaC 始终优于 GraphST 和 SEDR 等领先方法。SOMaC 实现了显著更高的聚类质量,平均 Silhouette 评分为 0.21(GraphST 为 0.11),Calinski-Harabasz 指数改善逾两倍,表明空间域更紧凑、更易分离。在多重蛋白质组学数据集(包括人结肠癌 IMC)上,SOMaC 展现了强大的跨模态泛化能力,Calinski-Harabasz 指数达 40,541,Davies-Bouldin 指数为 3.03。值得注意的是,SOMaC 解析出了现有方法难以捕获的精细尺度肿瘤-免疫界面、基质屏障和功能性免疫生态位。
通过在转录组和蛋白质组平台上联合建模分子相互作用结构和空间架构,SOMaC 提供了一个统一且可解释的框架,用于剖析肿瘤生态系统。该方法能够高分辨率地发现空间组织的细胞状态、调控程序和微环境生态位,为癌症生物学和治疗靶向提供新的见解。
查看英文原文 English abstract
Spatial omics technologies, including spatial transcriptomics and multiplex spatial proteomics, provide unprecedented opportunities to characterize cellular organization, microenvironmental interactions, and functional states within intact tumor tissues. However, integrating these heterogeneous modalities and resolving spatially coherent cell states and immune niches remain major computational challenges. Existing approaches typically analyze individual modalities in isolation, rely on expression-based feature spaces that overlook higher-order molecular structure, and provide limited interpretability for biological discovery.
We present SOMaC, an interpretable and generalizable framework for integrating and clustering multimodal spatial omics data to resolve cellular and microenvironmental architecture in cancer tissues. SOMaC extends the OmicsMap paradigm by transforming each cell or spot into an image-like molecular interaction map that encodes pairwise gene or protein correlations, capturing regulatory structure beyond conventional expression matrices. These biologically grounded representations are jointly integrated with spatial topology using a convolutional autoencoder, graph neural network, and learnable-center clustering module, enabling end-to-end optimization of molecular-spatial embeddings for domain discovery.
Across 13 benchmark datasets spanning nine human and mouse tissues profiled by 10x Visium, Xenium, Slide-seqV2, Stereo-seq, imaging mass cytometry (IMC), and CODEX, SOMaC consistently outperformed leading methods such as GraphST and SEDR. SOMaC achieved significantly higher clustering quality, with an average Silhouette score of 0.21 (vs. 0.11 for GraphST) and more than a two-fold improvement in the Calinski-Harabasz Index, indicating tighter and more separable spatial domains. On multiplex proteomics datasets, including human colon cancer IMC, SOMaC demonstrated strong cross-modality generalization, achieving a Calinski-Harabasz Index of 40,541 and a Davies-Bouldin Index of 3.03. Notably, SOMaC resolved fine-scale tumor-immune interfaces, stromal barriers, and functional immune niches that were poorly captured by existing methods.
By jointly modeling molecular interaction structure and spatial architecture across transcriptomic and proteomic platforms, SOMaC provides a unified and interpretable framework for dissecting tumor ecosystems. This approach enables high-resolution discovery of spatially organized cell states, regulatory programs, and microenvironmental niches, offering new insights into cancer biology and therapeutic targeting.
利益披露 Disclosure
J. Shi, None.