Figure 1.

Schematic overview of spaCI. (A) The spaCI method leverages the spatial relationships between cells as well as the expression data of all available genes to infer the L–R interactions. (B) In spaCI, genes are projected into the latent space through two components: a gene-based linear encoder as well as a cell-based attentive graph encoder. In this way, both gene expression patterns and spatial cell relations are incorporated into the latent space. Triplet loss is adopted in spaCI to assure a clear separation of interactive and non-interactive pairs.