COMP and atherosclerosis: To study ITIH4 expression in human atherosclerosis, we performed spatial transcriptomics in carotid and femoral endarterectomy samples using a panel of five genes (ANPEP, COMP, FBLN1, IGFBP2, and ITIH4), selected based on expression profile in human atherosclerosis scRNA-Seq and excluding highly expressed genes due to method limitations (risk of optical crowding interfering with the transcript decoding).