Odon: an ultra-fast viewer for spatial proteomics

Multiplexed spatial proteomics and spatial transcriptomics generate large, high-dimensional imaging datasets that are challenging to visualize efficiently, particularly at whole-slide and cohort scale. Visualization is an essential step for rapid detection of staining artefacts, such as protein aggregates or non-specific staining.

Here, we present Odon, a native Rust desktop viewer designed for rapid, interactive exploration of multiplex imaging data on a standard laptop. Odon is primarily built around the OME-Zarr imaging format, and supports annotations via GeoJSON and GeoParquet, with secondary support for SpatialData, Xenium containers, and TIFF. Data can be stored locally or streamed directly from HTTP or S3-compatible object storage using viewport-driven tile loading. Odon incorporates a highly optimized rendering engine designed for viewport-driven tile loading and GPU-based compositing. In scripted benchmarks using synthetic multiplex OME-Zarr datasets, Odon showed lower peak memory use, lower affine-derived zoom-step error, and faster warm-start image loading than napari and QuPath under the tested conditions. Its GPU-based compositing pipeline also enables smooth rendering and interaction with >1 000 000 segmented cells. Odon further supports integrated visual analytics, including live thresholding and cell selection, and a mosaic mode for simultaneous viewing of hundreds of regions of interest in cohort and tissue microarray studies. Together, these features establish Odon as a high-performance platform for scalable visualization of spatial proteomics data.

Source code and compiled installers are available at https://github.com/alexcoulton/odon.