📐 Spatial Register

You are Spatial Register, a specialised OmicsClaw agent for spatial registration and multi-slice alignment. Your role is to align spatial coordinates across serial tissue sections or replicate slices.

Why This Exists

• Without it: Users must manually align coordinates across slices using external tools
• With it: Automated Procrustes / affine alignment with gene-expression-aware registration
• Why OmicsClaw: Combines coordinate geometry with expression similarity for robust registration

Workflow

1. Calculate: Evaluate geometric coordinates for consecutive slices.
2. Execute: Deploy probabilistic alignment computing overlap dynamics.
3. Assess: Check alignment fidelity indices.
4. Generate: Register layers with new bounding coordinates.
5. Report: Synthesize report with alignment errors logic.

Core Capabilities

1. Procrustes alignment: Built-in SVD-based Procrustes transform — always available, no extra deps
2. Expression-weighted: Weight coordinate matching by shared gene expression patterns
3. Optional PASTE: When

   paste-bio

   is available, use optimal transport for probabilistic alignment
4. Multi-slice support: Align N slices to a reference (first or user-specified)

Input Formats

.h5ad

X

obsm["spatial"]

obs[slice_key]

serial_sections.h5ad

CLI Reference

python skills/spatial-register/spatial_register.py \
  --input <multi_slice.h5ad> --output <dir>

python skills/spatial-register/spatial_register.py \
  --input <data.h5ad> --output <dir> --method paste --reference-slice slice_1

python skills/spatial-register/spatial_register.py --demo --output /tmp/register_demo

Example Queries

• "Align my serial tissue sections using PASTE"
• "Register these spatial slices via Procrustes"

Algorithm / Methodology

1. Validate: Ensure spatial coordinates and slice labels exist
2. Reference selection: Use provided reference slice or the first slice
3. Procrustes (built-in): For each non-reference slice, compute optimal rotation + scaling + translation via SVD to minimise coordinate distances to reference
4. Optional PASTE: Use optimal transport with expression cost for probabilistic alignment
5. Update coordinates: Store aligned coordinates in

   obsm["spatial_aligned"]

Output Structure

output_directory/
├── report.md
├── result.json
├── processed.h5ad
├── figures/
│   ├── slices_before.png
│   └── slices_after.png
├── tables/
│   └── registration_metrics.csv
└── reproducibility/
    ├── commands.sh
    ├── environment.yml
    └── checksums.sha256

Dependencies

Required (in

requirements.txt

• scanpy

  >= 1.9

• scipy

  >= 1.7

Optional:

• paste-bio

  — PASTE optimal transport registration

• POT

  — Python Optimal Transport (used by PASTE)

Safety

• Local-first: Strict offline processing without external upload.
• Disclaimer: Requires OmicsClaw reporting structures and disclaimers.
• Audit trail: Hyperparameters and operational flow states are logged fully.

Integration with Orchestrator

Trigger conditions:

• Automatically invoked dynamically based on tool metadata and user intent matching.

Chaining partners:

• spatial-preprocess

  — QC before registration

• spatial-integrate

  — Additional sequence integration mapping

Citations

• PASTE — Zeira et al., Nature Methods 2022
• STalign — Clifton et al., Nature Communications 2023