journal article·2026-06-02Open access

stMixer for Scalable Mosaic Integration and Label Transfer in Spatial Histology and Multi‐Omics

Qixing Yang, Yan Wang, Luonan Chen, Chunman Zuo

Abstract

ABSTRACT Integrating spatial histology with multi‐slide, multi‐omics data is essential for deciphering tissue architecture and cellular dynamics at high resolution. However, incomplete modality overlap across sections hinders coherent integration and cross‐condition analysis. Here, we present stMixer, an unsupervised framework that (i) employs self‐looped cross‐attention to jointly encode histological, molecular, and spatial features; (ii) implements a multi‐modal metric learning module to achieve biologically coherent integration across sections; and (iii) uses a graph‐guided, cluster‐level voting algorithm to enable anatomically faithful label propagation. Benchmarking across six spatial modalities demonstrates that stMixer achieves superior scalability and accuracy in dimensionality reduction, batch correction, and label transfer. The framework accommodates large, heterogeneous datasets across tissues, species, and technologies. We further showcase its versatility in mosaic integration, pseudo‐time inference, and cross‐tissue knowledge transfer. Notably, stMixer uncovers transient thymic states overlooked by competing methods, resolves fine‐grained cortical microstructures, and corrects anatomical mis‐annotations through integration with single‐cell reference. stMixer is available at https://github.com/YQX‐code/stMixer/ .
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics · Cell Image Analysis Techniques · AI in cancer detection

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

College of Computer Science and Technology Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education Jilin University Changchun China

State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol Innovation Center for Evolutionary Synthetic Biology School of Life Sciences Sun Yat‐sen University Guangzhou China

School of Mathematical Sciences and School of AI Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai China

Key Laboratory of Systems Health Science of Zhejiang Province School of Life Science Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Chinese Academy of Sciences Hangzhou China

Tianfu Jincheng Laboratory Chengdu China

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China · Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality

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