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From an image to a virtual molecular view

A single H&E slide can become a new window into tissue biology.

What a map like this is for

  • Explore archived cohorts. Open new questions in the slides and studies you already hold.
  • Compare tissue regions. Set the regions of one section, or of many sections, side by side on the same predicted genes.
  • Prioritise follow-up experiments. Choose where to place the next capture area, which samples to measure first, and which hypotheses to take to validation.

Decide whether Aurora fits your research.

Explore the spatial molecular view Aurora predicts from morphology

Explore the example slide on the website, in your browser. The slide below is another: an open-access melanoma that had spread to a lymph node.

The section at low magnification: a melanoma metastasis in a lymph node, stained pink and purple on the pale mount around it, with three rings drawn on it marking the places shown close up below.
An open-access slide of a melanoma metastasis in a lymph node. The three rings mark the places the next figure shows at full resolution.

Three things sit side by side in that node: its own lymphoid tissue, the collagen that wraps and divides it, and the deposit that has replaced part of it. Here they are up close.

Three squares of the same slide at full resolution, left to right: the node's own lymphoid tissue; the collagen of the capsule and the septa; the deposit that has replaced the node's own tissue. The one tile at the centre of each is outlined.
Left to right: the node's own lymphoid tissue; the collagen of the capsule and the septa; the deposit that has replaced the node's own tissue. Each is read from the slide at full resolution, and the outlined square at the centre is one tile.

Genes you can check against the stain

A prediction covers every gene the model returns, and a map can be checked against the slide itself.

Two are shown here, each for a structure a pathologist can point at.

Gene High in The stain a pathologist knows it by
MS4A1 the node's B-cell follicles the B-cell protein a CD20 stain reports
COL1A1 the collagen of the capsule and the septa type I collagen, the fibre a trichrome stain picks out

The deposit is what stays dark in both maps.

The same slide, with and without a bulk profile

Add the sample's bulk RNA profile to the prediction for its slide, and keep the same genes and file format. Without a bulk profile, Aurora predicts from the slide alone.

Gene
Bulk profile
MS4A1 predicted at each of 24,308 tiles of the section, without a bulk profile: a heat map on the shape of the tissue, brighter where the predicted value is higher. MS4A1 is high in the node's B-cell follicles, which is what a reader checks the map against. MS4A1 predicted at each of 24,308 tiles of the section, with this sample's own bulk profile: a heat map on the shape of the tissue, brighter where the predicted value is higher. MS4A1 is high in the node's B-cell follicles, which is what a reader checks the map against. COL1A1 predicted at each of 24,308 tiles of the section, without a bulk profile: a heat map on the shape of the tissue, brighter where the predicted value is higher. COL1A1 is high in the collagen of the capsule and the septa, which is what a reader checks the map against. COL1A1 predicted at each of 24,308 tiles of the section, with this sample's own bulk profile: a heat map on the shape of the tissue, brighter where the predicted value is higher. COL1A1 is high in the collagen of the capsule and the septa, which is what a reader checks the map against.
A strip of the colours a map is drawn in, running from the dark end on the left to the bright end on the right. It carries no number: each map is fitted to its own values, so the two ends are the ends of the map on screen.
lowerhigher
An open-access slide of a melanoma metastasis in a lymph node. The same 24,308 tiles, the same model, one input different: every tile of tissue the model read inside the section.

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