Graduate Student Seminar- Supervised Gromov-Wasserstein Optimal Transport and Its Application in Single Cell Biology.

Date: January 23, (Friday) 2-3 pm

Location: Rome 771 

Speaker: Yaki Wu, GWU

Title:  Supervised Gromov-Wasserstein Optimal Transport and Its Application in Single Cell Biology.

Abstract:Spatial transcriptomics (ST) captures mRNA expression across thousands of spots on a tissue slice while recording each spot’s two-dimensional coordinates. However, ST technologies measure expression only within two-dimensional slices taken from three-dimensional tissues, leading to a loss of shared information across slices from the same tissue. Integrating spatial transcriptomic data from multiple slices can help recover this information and enhance downstream analyses, but aligning multiple slices remains challenging, especially when two slices are relatively far apart. To address this, we introduce RAFT-UP, a robust alignment method designed for spatial transcriptomic slices under partial-overlapping. RAFT-UP aligns and integrates ST data from tissue slices by computing pairwise partial alignments derived from a fused supervised Gromov-Wasserstein framework that incorporates both transcriptional similarity and physical distances between spots. We demonstrate that RAFT-UP accurately aligns spots across slices by comparing with existing alignment methods on multi-cellular and single-cellular resolution benchmarking datasets.

Graduate Student Seminar is mandatory for all math graduate students.