Proteomics-constrained deconvolution reveals spatial cell-type programs in tumours
Accurately resolving cell-type mixtures in spatial transcriptomics remains challenging, particularly in heterogeneous tumours where cell populations are intermixed and matched single-cell references may be unavailable or poorly aligned. Current deconvolution approaches either require high-quality scRNA-seq references, suffer from scalability limitations, or lack interpretability. We introduce PISTACHIO, a proteomics-informed spatial transcriptomics deconvolution framework based on constrained non-negative matrix factorization with a negative-binomial likelihood. Rather than using probabilistic priors, PISTACHIO incorporates spatial cell-type constraints derived from paired Imaging Mass Cytometry, enforcing biologically grounded sparsity and explicit spatial feasibility of cell-type presence. PISTACHIO improved recovery of spatial cell-type distributions compared with Cell2location and STdeconvolve across synthetic and real tumour datasets. Our approach remains robust under cell-type assignment errors, maintaining high correlation with ground-truth under moderate noise, and achieves fast runtime on standard hardware, enabling practical large-scale deployment.