In addition, some community developed MALDI-based MSI pipeline has been made available through Mass Spectrometry Imaging Society (maldi-msi.org). Nevertheless, due to the co-existing of independent data formats depend on MSI instrumentation vendors, the MSI data analysis is largely independent practice in the past.  The Recent adaptation of common imzML data format \citep{22842151} within major instrument vendors has allowed the development of the independent analysing tools and more vivid statistical analysis to identify analyte distributions and colocalizations more accurately. Clustering techniques on MSI data are also very limited to mainly hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis, many more common clustering techniques will need to be incorporated to allow more vivid data analysis. 
MSI data is inherently heterogeneous.