STiLE: Automated Tissue Microarray Dearraying for Spatial Transcriptomics.

STiLE automates tissue microarray dearraying with over 99% accuracy using only cell centroid coordinates, streamlining spatial transcriptomics analysis.

• Why it matters: Manual dearraying is a bottleneck in spatial transcriptomics, especially when existing methods rely on histological images that are prone to artefacts, limiting efficiency and scalability.
• What they did: The team developed STiLE, an algorithm combining connectivity detection, density-based clustering, and grid-based peak detection, validated on seven public TMA samples and 396 synthetic datasets.
• The result: STiLE achieved highly robust performance with mean ARI of 0.992, supports multiple platforms, and offers an interactive interface, enabling faster, more reliable spatial transcriptomic data processing.