SHIELD: A weakly supervised graph attention neural network for decoding disease-relevant cell-cell interactions.

Vivek Sehra, Benjamin Ruf, Gabriel Duval, Sepideh Babaei, Manfred Claassen

Abstract read

In one paragraph

Article in Patterns (New York, N.Y.), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

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1citing papers in PubMed

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1 citing paper in PubMed.

SHIELD: A weakly supervised graph attention neural network for decoding disease-relevant cell-cell interactions.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2026
Article

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5 authors.

Vivek SehraDepartment of Internal Medicine I, University Hospital Tübingen, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.

Benjamin RufDepartment of Internal Medicine I, University Hospital Tübingen, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.

Gabriel DuvalDepartment of Internal Medicine I, University Hospital Tübingen, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.

Sepideh BabaeiDepartment of Internal Medicine I, University Hospital Tübingen, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.

Manfred ClaassenDepartment of Internal Medicine I, University Hospital Tübingen, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Multiplexed tissue imaging enables detailed study of cell-cell interactions in disease, yet systematic, interpretable, and supervised computational methods for inferring such interactions remain scarce. We present SHIELD (spatially enhanced immune landscape decoding), a graph attention network framework that quantifies disease-relevant cell-cell interactions through learned attention scores, without relying on prior biological assumptions such as ligand-receptor databases. Validated across three multiplexed tissue imaging datasets-hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), colorectal cancer (CRC), and type 1 diabetes (T1D)-SHIELD identifies rare mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) cell-macrophage interactions in HCC, suppressive CD8

Indexed as

cancerdiabetesgraph attention networkhighly multiplexed tissue imagingsingle-cell biologyspatial biology

Identifiers

PMID42453692

DOI10.1016/j.patter.2026.101562

PMCPMC13366524

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.