Welcome to STEP’s documentation!

Overview

STEP, an acronym for Spatial Transcriptomics Embedding Procedure, is a foundation deep learning/AI architecture for the analysis of spatially resolved transcriptomics (SRT) data, and is also compatible with scRNA-seq data. STEP roots on the precise captures of three major varitions occured in the SRT (and scRNA-seq) data: Transcriptional Variations, Batch Variations and Spatial Variations with the correponding modular designs: Backbone model: a Transformer based model togther with gene module seqeunce mapping; Batch-effect model: A pair of inverse transformations utilizing the batch-embedding conception for the decoupled batch-effect elimination; Spatial model: a GCN-based spatial filter/smoother working on the extracted embedding from the Backbone model, different from the usage of GCN in other methods as a feature extractor. Thus, with the proper combinations of these models, STEP introduces a unified approach to systematically process and analyze single or multiple samples of SRT data, disregarding location relationships between sections (meaning both contiguous and non-contiguous sections), to reveal multi-scale bilogical heterogeneities (cell types and spatial domains) in multi-resolution SRT data. Furthermore, STEP can also conduct integrative analysis on scRNA-seq and SRT data.

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