JADE: Joint Alignment and Deep Embedding for Multi-Slice Spatial Transcriptomics
Yuanchuan Guo, Jun Liu, Huimin Cheng, Ying Ma
As spatial transcriptomics (ST) datasets increasingly span multiple adjacent or replicated slices, effective joint analysis across slices is needed to reconstruct tissue structures and identify consistent spatial gene expression patterns. This requires resolving spatial correspondences between slices while capturing shared transcriptomic features, two tasks that are typically addressed in isolation. Multi-slice analysis remains challenging due to physical distortions, technical variability, and batch effects. To address these challenges, we introduce Joint Alignment and Deep Embedding for multi-slice ST (JADE), a unified computational framework that simultaneously learns spot-wise alignments and shared low-dimensional embeddings across tissue slices. Unlike existing methods, JADE adopts a roundtrip framework in which each iteration alternates between alignment and embedding refinement. To infer alignment, we employ attention mechanisms that dynamically assess and weight the importance of different embedding dimensions, allowing the model to focus on the most alignment-relevant features while suppressing noise. To the best of our knowledge, JADE is the first method that jointly optimizes alignment and representation learning in a shared latent space, enabling robust multi-slice integration. We demonstrate that JADE outperforms existing alignment and embedding methods across multiple evaluation metrics in the 10x Visium human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and Stereo-seq axolotl brain datasets. By bridging spatial alignment and feature integration, JADE provides a scalable and accurate solution for cross-slice analysis of ST data.