Fabian Svara, CEO of ariadne.ai, explained that his company specialises in unlocking neuroscience applications and spatial omics. More specifically, the organisation focuses on biomedical image analysis, developing custom software and offering ready-made products to address data analysis bottlenecks in automated microscopy labs.
So far, Ariadne.ai has received stellar feedback from clients highlighting the company’s credibility. Homing in on the spatial omics software capabilities, Svara highlighted that his spatial software product, SPATIAL, is available through a web browser based on a subscription model and allows users to conduct end-to-end analysis of mid to high plex image data. The software is device-agnostic and runs heavy computations in the cloud for user convenience.
Regarding the neuroscience side of things, SPATIAL provides detailed morphometric analysis of neuronal and glial types. Alongside this, it supports the classification of pathological protein aggregates, including amyloid beta, tau, and alpha synuclein. It is co-marketed with device manufacturers for these applications.
Next, Svara highlighted some technology workflow advantages. For example, the platform offers elastic image registration, segmentation models for tissue and cell types, masking for artifact suppression, and marker mapping for single-cell analysis with spatial context. For cell and nuclei segmentation, tissue regions, and artefact suppression, the workflow relies on pre-trained models.
Moving on to a case study, Adriene.ai is collaborating with OHSU to analyse human postmortem brain samples stained for 45 proteins. The collaborators used SPATIAL for cell segmentation, classification, and spatial analysis of amyloid beta plaques. Then they classified cortical layers and cell types, revealing subtypes within microglia and their association with Alzheimer’s pathology.
The results of the study showed that certain microglia subtypes (BLM) are more common in Alzheimer’s samples and preferentially associate with dense amyloid beta plaques. Overall, this supports the hypothesis that microglial response to dense plaques contributes to brain disruption in Alzheimer’s. The research is currently under review at Nature Neuroscience.
