Spatial Transcriptomics Expression Prediction from Histopathology Based on Cross-Modal Mask Reconstruction and Contrastive Learning
This work addresses the challenge of limited spatial transcriptomics data for tumor microenvironment analysis and cancer diagnosis, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The study tackled the problem of predicting spatially resolved gene expression from whole-slide images due to the high cost of acquiring spatial transcriptomics data, achieving improvements in Pearson Correlation Coefficient by 6.27%, 6.11%, and 11.26% for different gene types across six disease datasets.
Spatial transcriptomics is a technology that captures gene expression levels at different spatial locations, widely used in tumor microenvironment analysis and molecular profiling of histopathology, providing valuable insights into resolving gene expression and clinical diagnosis of cancer. Due to the high cost of data acquisition, large-scale spatial transcriptomics data remain challenging to obtain. In this study, we develop a contrastive learning-based deep learning method to predict spatially resolved gene expression from whole-slide images. Evaluation across six different disease datasets demonstrates that, compared to existing studies, our method improves Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) in the prediction of highly expressed genes, highly variable genes, and marker genes by 6.27%, 6.11%, and 11.26% respectively. Further analysis indicates that our method preserves gene-gene correlations and applies to datasets with limited samples. Additionally, our method exhibits potential in cancer tissue localization based on biomarker expression.