A Unique Cellular Organization of Human Distal Airways and Its Disarray in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

Remodeling and loss of distal conducting airways, including preterminal and terminal bronchioles (pre-TBs/TBs), underlie progressive airflow limitation in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The cellular basis of these structural changes remains unknown. To identify biological changes in pre-TBs/TBs in COPD at single-cell resolution and determine their cellular origin.

Unsupervised discovery of tissue architecture in multiplexed imaging.

Multiplexed imaging and spatial transcriptomics enable highly resolved spatial characterization of cellular phenotypes, but still largely depend on laborious manual annotation to understand higher-order patterns of tissue organization. As a result, higher-order patterns of tissue organization are poorly understood and not systematically connected to disease pathology or clinical outcomes. To address this gap, we developed an approach called UTAG to identify and quantify microanatomical tissue structures in multiplexed images without human intervention.