Quantifying overlap requirements for physical alignment of tissue sections

Develop criteria and algorithms to identify partial overlaps between tissue sections and quantify the minimum overlap area necessary to achieve successful alignment when integrating spatially resolved transcriptomics datasets in physical space.

Background

Physical-space integration often involves aligning tissue images or sections that may only partially overlap due to sampling or tissue heterogeneity. Existing methods vary in how they handle partial matches, and guidance on minimal shared area to ensure reliable alignment is lacking.

This uncertainty limits robust scaling of alignment methods to atlas-scale datasets and complicates downstream analyses that rely on accurate spatial correspondence.