1.8.1

1.8.1 (15.07.2026)

Added

• li.ut.expand_coordinates — utility that lays out the spatial coordinates of multiple samples side-by-side on a non-overlapping grid, enabling multi-sample spatial analyses (e.g. a joint spatial_neighbors graph) without cross-sample coordinate overlap. Exposed in li.ut and the API reference. (#238)
• MOFA-Flex inflow tutorial (inflow_mofaflex.ipynb) showing how to combine the inflow score with MOFA-Flex to extract spatially-resolved, single-cell-derived cell-cell communication programs.

Changed

• LRIC / cross-PCF memory & performance refactor (#245, by @AtheerAS). li.mt.lric and li.mt.cross_pcf now route preprocessing through prep_check_adata, build per-annulus sparse scale matrices and multiply them against the weight matrices in chunked (pair_chunk) column slices — bounding peak memory to a few hundred MB on large datasets — and use SciPy sparse_distance_matrix / searchsorted for distance binning. This also fixes a .raw-subsetting bug in feature extraction, which slightly changes LRIC output values (test reference values updated accordingly). The LRIC tutorial was re-run to reflect the new numerics.

Fixed

• MistyData now preserves more than .uns on MuData round-trips (#242). Converting a MuData back to MistyData previously dropped .uns, breaking downstream plots such as li.pl.contributions; the conversion now carries over uns, obsm, varm, obsp and varp.
• rank_aggregate / by_sample dependency compatibility (#244). The AnnData dtype= removal (AnnData ≥0.11) is handled in preprocessing. pandas 3.0 additionally breaks the consensus path — Copy-on-Write turns a chained inplace fillna into a no-op, and string-typed columns coerce an internal None-labelled score column to 'nan' — so pandas<3 is pinned until liana gains full pandas-3.0 support.