This package can be installed from Bioconductor:
if (!requireNamespace("BiocManager", quietly = TRUE))
install.packages("BiocManager")
BiocManager::install("SpatialFeatureExperiment")
SpatialFeatureExperiment
(SFE) is a new S4 class built on top of SpatialExperiment
(SPE). SpatialFeatureExperiment
incorporates geometries and geometry operations with the sf
package. Examples of supported geometries are Visium spots represented with polygons corresponding to their size, cell or nuclei segmentation polygons, tissue boundary polygons, pathologist annotation of histological regions, and transcript spots of genes. Using sf
, SpatialFeatureExperiment
leverages the GEOS C++ libraries underlying sf
for geometry operations, including algorithms for for determining whether geometries intersect, finding intersection geometries, buffering geometries with margins, etc. A schematic of the SFE object is shown below: