GCNLA: Inferring Cell-Cell Interactions From Spatial Transcriptomics With Long Short-Term Memory and Graph Convolutional Networks

Spatial transcriptomics analysis methods offer an opportunity to investigate highly diverse biological tissues. Cell-cell communication is fundamental for maintaining physiological homeostasis in organisms and coordinating complex biological processes. Identifying cell-cell interactions is critical for understanding cellular activities. The interaction of a cell with other cells depends on several factors, and most of the existing methods that consider only gene expression information of neighbouring cells and spatial location information are somewhat limited. In this paper, we propose a network architecture based on graph convolution network and long short-term memory attention module-GCNLA, which contains graph convolution layer, long short-term memory network, attention module, and residual connections. GCNLA not only learns the spatial structure of cells but also captures interaction information between distal cells, the attention module further extracting and enhancing features related to cell-cell interactions. Finally, the inner product decoding calculates the cosine similarity, which is used to infer cell-cell interactions. In addition, GCNLA is capable of reconstructing the complete cell-cell interaction network. The experimental results on seqFISH and MERFISH demonstrate that the GCNLA network structure has better robustness and noise immunity. The potential features learned by GCNLA enable other downstream analyses, including single-cell resolution cell clustering based on spatial information resolving cell heterogeneity.