scResolve: Recovering single cell expression profiles from multi-cellular spatial transcriptomics

Many popular spatial transcriptomics techniques lack single-cell resolution. Instead, these methods measure the collective gene expression for each location from a mixture of cells, potentially containing multiple cell types. Here, we developed scResolve, a method for recovering single-cell expression profiles from spatial transcriptomics measurements at multi-cellular resolution. scResolve accurately restores expression profiles of individual cells at their locations, which is unattainable from cell type deconvolution. Applications of scResolve on human breast cancer data and human lung disease data demonstrate that scResolve enables cell type-specific differential gene expression analysis between different tissue contexts and accurate identification of rare cell populations. The spatially resolved cellular-level expression profiles obtained through scResolve facilitate more flexible and precise spatial analysis that complements raw multi-cellular level analysis.