ABSTRACT Advances in spatially resolved technologies enable the simultaneous acquisition of diverse data modalities within a tissue slice while preserving critical spatial context, which presents unprecedented opportunities to decipher intricate tissue heterogeneity. However, existing computational approaches lack the intrinsic flexibility to universally process both spatial multi‐modal and multi‐omics data. Here, we introduce STransformer, a unified deep learning framework designed to seamlessly accommodate a comprehensive landscape of spatial data. By simultaneously capturing short‐range cellular interactions and tissue‐wide semantic patterns, it extracts robust representations to accurately dissect complex tissue heterogeneity. Systematic evaluations across diverse species, tissue types, and data modalities highlight its profound versatility. For spatial multi‐modal data, STransformer delineates intricate anatomical structures in the human cortex, uncovers pathological mechanisms in Alzheimer's disease, and characterizes dynamic spatiotemporal developmental trajectories during chicken cardiogenesis. Scaling to spatial multi‐omics data, STransformer synergizes spatial transcriptomic and proteomic profiles to decipher intricate immune microenvironments within the human tonsil, and jointly analyzes spatial epigenomic and transcriptomic data to infer regulatory mechanisms in the mouse embryonic brain. Consequently, STransformer serves as a highly versatile and robust analytical framework for advancing our understanding of tissue heterogeneity and disease pathogenesis.
Li et al. (Tue,) studied this question.