mxfda: a comprehensive toolkit for functional data analysis of single-cell spatial data

Abstract

Summary Technologies that produce spatial single-cell data have revolutionized the study of tissue microstructures and promise to advance personalized treatment of cancer by revealing new insights about the tumor microenvironment. Functional data analysis is an ideal analytic framework for connecting cell spatial relationships to patient outcomes, but can be challenging to implement. To address this need, we present mxfda, an R package for end-to-end analysis of single-cell spatial data using functional data analysis. mxfda implements a suite of methods to facilitate spatial analysis of single-cell imaging data using functional data analysis techniques. Availability and implementation The mxfda R package is freely available at https://cran.r-project.org/package=mxfda and has detailed documentation, including four vignettes, available at http://juliawrobel.com/mxfda/.