What is CAJAL?
CAJAL is a general computational framework for the multi-modal analysis and integration of single-cell morphological data. It builds upon recent advances in applied metric geometry and shape registration to enable the characterization of morphological cellular processes from a biophysical perspective and produce a mathematical distance function upon which algebraic and statistical analytic approaches can be built.
In its simplest form, the study of cell morphology involves comparing cell shapes irrespective of distance-preserving transformations such as rotations and translations. To facilitate this, CAJAL internally represents a cell as a list of points randomly sampled from the surface of the cell (usually between 50 and 200), together with a matrix of the (Euclidean or geodesic) pairwise distances between these points in the cell, known as the intracellular distance matrix.
In a hypothetical scenario where computational speed is infinite, comparing two intracellular distance matrices would be conducted as follows. Consider cells A and B, each containing 50 selected sample points. The distance between sample points i and j in cell A can be denoted as A(i,j). If we have a pairing f between the sample points of A and B, we can consider f as an attempt to superimpose A on B. The distortion of A that arises from this pairing can be quantified by:
This quantifies how much A has to be deformed or stretched in order to overlay it on B along the given pairing.
The Gromov-Hausdorff distance between A and B is then defined as the distortion arising from the best possible pairing, when all possible pairings are considered.
Unfortunately, this quantity cannot be computed in practice, as there are 50! or about 3x10^64 ways to give a one-to-one pairing between the points of A and B, and we cannot search through all of these. Therefore, CAJAL relies on a more computationally efficient approximation, the Gromov-Wasserstein distance. Both the Gromov-Hausdorff distance and the Gromov-Wasserstein distance satisfy the axioms for a metric, giving a sensible and reasonably well-behaved notion of distance.
CAJAL provides tools to compute the pairwise Gromov-Wasserstein distance between all cells in a directory of cell image data and exploring, interpreting, and analyzing the resulting cell morphology latent space. For example, the user can use clustering approaches to identify groups of cells with similar morphology and predict features of new cells by comparing their shape with other cells. They can also investigate whether a cell feature is highly correlated with its morphology. CAJAL provides tools for exploring, interpreting, and analyzing the cell morphology latent space produced by CAJAL.
CAJAL is written and developed by the Cámara Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. More information about the theoretical foundations of CAJAL can be found at:
- Govek, K. W., et al. CAJAL enables analysis and integration of single-cell morphological data using metric geometry. Nature Communications 14, 3672 (2023).
- Memoli, F. On the use of Gromov-Hausdorff distances for shape comparison. Eurographics Symposium on Point-Based Graphics (2007).
- Memoli, F. Gromov–Wasserstein distances and the metric approach to object matching. Foundations of computational mathematics 11, 417-487 (2011).
- Memoli, F. & Sapiro, G. A theoretical and computational framework for isometry invariant recognition of point cloud data. Foundations of Computational Mathematics 5, 313-347 (2005).