Editor’s Assessment

This paper describes a new spatial transcriptomics method, presenting a new approach to cell clustering using the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) metaheuristic. Which clusters cells based on both gene expression and spatial coordinates. Being able to stratify cells into meaningful clusters helps the understanding of tissue composition and also provides insights into disease etiology and potential therapeutic interventions. Validating this new method demonstrated that the performance of clustering methods is significantly influenced by the choice of embeddings and the way they were generated. The implementation and description was very complicated, but after some review and editing the writing has been simplified and more case studies added. Future research is needed to extend the method’s application to time-series datasets and explore additional VNS modifications and embedding techniques to enhance its utility.