Vizgen and Ultivue Merge. Learn more

Resources

HEARTSVG: a fast and accurate method for spatially variable gene identification in large-scale spatial transcriptomic data

Xin Yuan, Yanran Ma, Ruitian Gao, Shuya Cui, Yifan Wang, Botao Fa, Shiyang Ma, Ting Wei, Shuangge Ma, Zhangsheng Yu
bioRxiv (2023)

Abstract

Identifying spatially variable genes (SVGs) is crucial for understanding the spatiotemporal characteristics of diseases and tissue structures, posing a distinctive challenge in spatial transcriptomics research. We propose HEARTSVG, a distribution-free, test-based method for fast and accurately identifying spatially variable genes in large-scale spatial transcriptomic data. Extensive simulations demonstrate that HEARTSVG outperforms state-of-the-art methods with higher F1 scores (average F1 score=0.903), improved computational efficiency, scalability, and reduced false positives (FPs). Through analysis of twelve real datasets from various spatial transcriptomic technologies, HEARTSVG identifies a greater number of biologically significant SVGs (average recall=0.985, average AUC=0.788) than other comparative methods without prespecifing spatial patterns. Furthermore, by clustering SVGs, we uncover two distinct tumor spatial domains characterized by unique spatial expression patterns, spatial-temporal locations, and biological functions in human colorectal cancer data, unraveling the complexity of tumors.

Top