The goal of spaSim (spatial Simulator) is to facilitate tissue image simulations! It simulates cells with 2D locations (point data) and cell types in a tissue. The available patterns include background cells, cell clusters, immune cell rings and vessels. It also enables simulations that generate a set of images in one run!
As quantitative tools for spatial tissue image analysis have been
developed and need benchmarking, simulations from spaSim can be applied
to test and benchmark these tools and metrics. The output of spaSim are
images in SpatialExperiment object format and can be used with SPIAT.
SPIAT (Spatial Image Analysis of Tissues) is also
developed by our team.
To install this package, start R and enter:
if (!require("BiocManager", quietly = TRUE))
install.packages("BiocManager")
BiocManager::install("spaSim")You can install the development version of spaSim like so:
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("TrigosTeam/spaSim")The vignette with an overview of the package can be accessed from the top Menu under Articles or clicking here.
This is a basic example which shows how to simulate background cells with multiple cell types of different proportions.
library(spaSim)
set.seed(610)
mix_background <- TIS(n_cells = 5000, width = 2000, height = 2000,
bg_method = "Hardcore", min_d = 10,
names_of_bg_cells = c("Tumour","Immune","Others"),
proportions_of_bg_cells = c(0.1, 0.2, 0.7),
plot_image = TRUE)
spaSim was created, designed and implemented by Yuzhou Feng. Anna Trigos provided supervision and guidance.
Please check our latest paper for more information!
Yuzhou Feng et al, Spatial analysis with SPIAT and spaSim to characterize and simulate tissue microenvironments, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37822-0