license: cc-by-nc-sa-4.0
language:
- en
- vi
- aa
- an
tags:
- spatial-transcriptomics
- histology
- pathology
task_categories:
- image-classification
- feature-extraction
- image-segmentation
- table-question-answering
- text-classification
- text-to-speech
size_categories:
- 100M<n<1B
Model Card for HEST-1k

What is HEST-1k?
- A collection of 1,108 spatial transcriptomic profiles, each linked and aligned to a Whole Slide Image (with pixel size > 1.15 µm/px) and metadata.
- HEST-1k was assembled from 131 public and internal cohorts encompassing:
- 25 organs
- 2 species (Homo Sapiens and Mus Musculus)
- 320 cancer samples from 25 cancer types.
HEST-1k processing enabled the identification of 1.5 million expression/morphology pairs and 60 million nuclei
Instructions for Setting Up HuggingFace Account and Token
1. Create an Account on HuggingFace
Follow the instructions provided on the HuggingFace sign-up page.
2. Accept terms of use of HEST
- On this page click request access (access will be automatically granted)
- At this stage, you can already manually inspect the data by navigating in the
Files and version
3. Create a Hugging Face Token
Go to Settings: Navigate to your profile settings by clicking on your profile picture in the top right corner and selecting
Settings
from the dropdown menu.Access Tokens: In the settings menu, find and click on
Access tokens
.Create New Token:
- Click on
New token
. - Set the token name (e.g.,
hest
). - Set the access level to
Write
. - Click on
Create
.
- Click on
Copy Token: After the token is created, copy it to your clipboard. You will need this token for authentication.
4. Logging
Run the following
pip install datasets
from huggingface_hub import login
login(token="YOUR HUGGINGFACE TOKEN")
Download the entire HEST-1k dataset:
import datasets
local_dir='hest_data' # hest will be dowloaded to this folder
# Note that the full dataset is around 1TB of data
dataset = datasets.load_dataset(
'MahmoodLab/hest',
cache_dir=local_dir,
patterns='*'
)
Download a subset of HEST-1k:
import datasets
local_dir='hest_data' # hest will be dowloaded to this folder
ids_to_query = ['TENX96', 'TENX99'] # list of ids to query
list_patterns = [f"*{id}[_.]**" for id in ids_to_query]
dataset = datasets.load_dataset(
'MahmoodLab/hest',
cache_dir=local_dir,
patterns=list_patterns
)
Query HEST by organ, techonology, oncotree code...
import datasets
import pandas as pd
local_dir='hest_data' # hest will be dowloaded to this folder
meta_df = pd.read_csv("hf://datasets/MahmoodLab/hest/HEST_v1_0_2.csv")
# Filter the dataframe by organ, oncotree code...
meta_df = meta_df[meta_df['oncotree_code'] == 'IDC']
meta_df = meta_df[meta_df['organ'] == 'Breast']
ids_to_query = meta_df['id'].values
list_patterns = [f"*{id}[_.]**" for id in ids_to_query]
dataset = datasets.load_dataset(
'MahmoodLab/hest',
cache_dir=local_dir,
patterns=list_patterns
)
Loading the data with the python library hest
Once downloaded, you can then easily load the dataset as a List[HESTData]
:
from hest import load_hest
print('load hest...')
hest_data = load_hest('hest_data') # location of the data
print('loaded hest')
for d in hest_data:
print(d)
Please visit the github repo and the documentation for more information about the hest
library API.
Data organization
For each sample:
wsis/
: H&E stained Whole Slide Images in pyramidal Generic TIFF (or pyramidal Generic BigTIFF if >4.1GB)st/
: spatial transcriptomics expressions in a scanpy.h5ad
objectmetadata/
: metadataspatial_plots/
: overlay of the WSI with the st spotsthumbnails/
: downscaled version of the WSItissue_seg/
: tissue segmentation masks:- {id}_mask.jpg: downscaled or full resolution greyscale tissue mask
- {id}_mask.pkl: tissue/holes contours in a pickle file
- {id}_vis.jpg: visualization of the tissue mask on the downscaled WSI
cellvit_seg/
: cellvit nuclei segmentationpixel_size_vis/
: visualization of the pixel sizepatches/
: 256x256 H&E patches (0.5µm/px) extracted around ST spots in a .h5 object optimized for deep-learning. Each patch is matched to the corresponding ST profile (seest/
) with a barcode.patches_vis/
: visualization of the mask and patches on a downscaled WSI.
How to cite:
@article{jaume2024hest,
author = {Jaume, Guillaume and Doucet, Paul and Song, Andrew H. and Lu, Ming Y. and Almagro-Perez, Cristina and Wagner, Sophia J. and Vaidya, Anurag J. and Chen, Richard J. and Williamson, Drew F. K. and Kim, Ahrong and Mahmood, Faisal},
title = {{HEST-1k: A Dataset for Spatial Transcriptomics and Histology Image Analysis}},
journal = {arXiv},
year = {2024},
month = jun,
eprint = {2406.16192},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.16192v1}
}
Contact:
- Guillaume Jaume Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mahmood Lab (
[email protected]
) - Paul Doucet Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mahmood Lab (
[email protected]
)
The dataset is distributed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed)