通过多尺度与原型感知架构,提升组织切片预测基因表达的精度。
MMAP: A Multi-Magnification and Prototype-Aware Architecture for Predicting Spatial Gene Expression
- 采用多倍率图像块捕捉细粒度组织特征
- 学习全局原型嵌入以增强空间上下文理解
- 在多个指标上优于现有方法,适合病理分析研究者
空间转录组学(ST)可在保留空间信息的前提下测量基因表达,为组织结构与疾病机制提供关键洞察。近年来,研究尝试利用苏木精-伊红(H&E)染色的全幻灯片图像(WSI)通过深度神经网络预测全基因组表达谱。该任务通常被建模为回归问题,每个输入对应从WSI中提取的局部图像块。然而,由于视觉特征与分子信号之间存在显著模态差距,从组织学图像预测空间基因表达仍具挑战性。尽管已有研究尝试融合局部与全局信息,但现有方法仍存在两大局限:(1) 局部特征提取粒度不足;(2) 全局空间上下文覆盖不充分。本文提出一种新框架MMAP(多倍率与原型感知架构),同时解决上述问题。为增强局部特征粒度,MMAP采用多倍率图像块表示以捕捉精细组织细节;为改善全局上下文理解,其学习一组潜在原型嵌入,作为整张切片信息的紧凑表征。大量实验表明,MMAP在多项评估指标(包括平均绝对误差MAE、均方误差MSE和皮尔逊相关系数PCC)上持续优于所有现有最先进方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) enables the measurement of gene expression while preserving spatial information, offering critical insights into tissue architecture and disease pathology. Recent developments have explored the use of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained whole-slide images (WSIs) to predict transcriptome-wide gene expression profiles through deep neural networks. This task is commonly framed as a regression problem, where each input corresponds to a localized image patch extracted from the WSI. However, predicting spatial gene expression from histological images remains a challenging problem due to the significant modality gap between visual features and molecular signals. Recent studies have attempted to incorporate both local and global information into predictive models. Nevertheless, existing methods still suffer from two key limitations: (1) insufficient granularity in local feature extraction, and (2) inadequate coverage of global spatial context. In this work, we propose a novel framework, MMAP (Multi-MAgnification and Prototype-enhanced architecture), that addresses both challenges simultaneously. To enhance local feature granularity, MMAP leverages multi-magnification patch representations that capture fine-grained histological details. To improve global contextual understanding, it learns a set of latent prototype embeddings that serve as compact representations of slide-level information. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MMAP consistently outperforms all existing state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics, including Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Squared Error (MSE), and Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC).
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