STiLE: Automated Tissue Microarray Dearraying for Spatial Transcriptomics

Tissue microarrays (TMAs) enable high-throughput spatial transcriptomic profiling of dozens of tissue cores on a single slide. However, existing dearraying methods operate on histological images and do not support the coordinate-based outputs of spatial transcriptomics platforms. Therefore, task of assigning cells to their respective cores (dearraying) remains a manual bottleneck. We present STiLE, a tool for automated TMA dearraying that operates solely on cell centroid coordinates. By eliminating dependence on image data, STiLE is robust to artifacts such as variable staining quality and uneven illumination. The algorithm combines connectivity-based component detection, density-based clustering (HDBSCAN), component-guided cluster merging, and optional grid-based peak detection. Validation on eleven public TMA samples (50-150 cores, three platforms) achieved ARI > 0.99, while systematic benchmarking on 396 synthetic datasets with realistic artifacts demonstrated consistently robust performance (mean ARI = 0.992). STiLE accepts standard formats (AnnData, CSV) and is platform-agnostic, supporting diverse platforms including Vizgen MERSCOPE, 10x Xenium, and NanoString CosMx. An interactive Streamlit interface enables parameter tuning, visual inspection, and region-based processing for large slides.