MSIr: Automatic Registration Service for Mass Spectrometry Imaging and Histology

Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is a powerful tool that can be used to simultaneously investigate the spatial distribution of different molecules in samples. However, it is difficult to comprehensively analyze complex biological systems with only a single analytical technique due to different analytical properties and application limitations. Therefore, many analytical methods have been combined to extend data interpretation, evaluate data credibility, and facilitate data mining to explore important temporal and spatial relationships in biological systems. Image registration is an initial and critical step for multimodal imaging data fusion. However, the image registration of multimodal images is not a simple task. The property difference between each data modality may include spatial resolution, image characteristics, or both. The image registrations between MSI and different imaging techniques are often achieved indirectly through histology. Many methods exist for image registration between MSI data and histological images. However, most of them are manual or semiautomatic and have their prerequisites. Here, we built MSI Registrar (MSIr), a web service for automatic registration between MSI and histology. It can help to reduce subjectivity and processing time efficiently. MSIr provides an interface for manually selecting region of interests from histological images; the user selects regions of interest to extract the corresponding spectrum indices in MSI data. In the performance evaluation, MSIr can quickly map MSI data to histological images and help pinpoint molecular components at specific locations in tissues. Most registrations were adequate and were without excessive shifts. MSIr is freely available at https://msir.cmdm.tw and https://github.com/CMDM-Lab/MSIr.