TY - JOUR AU - Wüllems, Karsten AU - Kölling, Jan AU - Bednarz, Hanna AU - Niehaus, Karsten AU - Hans, Volkmar H. AU - Nattkemper, Tim W. PY - 2019 DA - 2019/06/04 TI - Detection and visualization of communities in mass spectrometry imaging data JO - BMC Bioinformatics SP - 303 VL - 20 IS - 1 AB - The spatial distribution and colocalization of functionally related metabolites is analysed in order to investigate the spatial (and functional) aspects of molecular networks. We propose to consider community detection for the analysis of m/z-images to group molecules with correlative spatial distribution into communities so they hint at functional networks or pathway activity. To detect communities, we investigate a spectral approach by optimizing the modularity measure. We present an analysis pipeline and an online interactive visualization tool to facilitate explorative analysis of the results. The approach is illustrated with synthetical benchmark data and two real world data sets (barley seed and glioblastoma section). SN - 1471-2105 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-019-2890-6 DO - 10.1186/s12859-019-2890-6 ID - Wüllems2019 ER -