Spatially aware clustering of ion images in mass spectrometry imaging data using deep learning

Computational analysis is crucial to capitalize on the wealth of spatio-molecular information generated by mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) experiments. Currently, the spatial information available in MSI data is often under-utilized, due to the challenges of in-depth spatial pattern extraction. The advent of deep learning has greatly facilitated such complex spatial analysis. In this work, we use a pre-trained neural network to extract high-level features from ion images in MSI data, and test whether this improves downstream data analysis. The resulting neural network interpretation of ion images, coined neural ion images, is used to cluster ion images based on spatial expressions. We evaluate the impact of neural ion images on two ion image clustering pipelines, namely DBSCAN clustering, combined with UMAP-based dimensionality reduction, and k-means clustering. In both pipelines, we compare regular and neural ion images from two different MSI datasets. All tested pipelines could extract underlying spatial patterns, but the neural network-based pipelines provided better assignment of ion images, with more fine-grained clusters, and greater consistency in the spatial structures assigned to individual clusters. Additionally, we introduce the relative isotope ratio metric to quantitatively evaluate clustering quality. The resulting scores show that isotopical m/z values are more often clustered together in the neural network-based pipeline, indicating improved clustering outcomes. The usefulness of neural ion images extends beyond clustering towards a generic framework to incorporate spatial information into any MSI-focused machine learning pipeline, both supervised and unsupervised. [Image: see text] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at (10.1007/s00216-021-03179-w)