Identifying spatial domains from spatial transcriptome by graph attention network

Abstract

Due to the high dimensionality and complexity of the data, the analysis of spatial transcriptome data has been a challenging problem. Meanwhile, cluster analysis is the core issue of the analysis of spatial transcriptome data. In this article, a deep learning approach is proposed based on graph attention networks for clustering analysis of spatial transcriptome data. Our method first enhances the spatial transcriptome data, then uses graph attention networks to extract features from nodes, and finally uses the Leiden algorithm for clustering analysis. Compared with the traditional non-spatial and spatial clustering methods, our method has better performance in data analysis through the clustering evaluation index. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively cluster spatial transcriptome data and identify different spatial domains, which provides a new tool for studying spatial transcriptome data.