The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
Predicting spatial gene expression from H&E images offers a scalable complement to experimental spatial transcriptomics. However, despite progress in spatial context modeling, how to construct subsequ...
The paper introduces BCARP, a Biology‑Guided Context‑Aware Residual Propagation framework that predicts spatial gene expression from H&E‑stained histology images. Rather than directly decoding expression from visual features, BCARP treats histology embeddings as morphological priors and iteratively refines spot representations in a transcriptomics‑oriented latent space, integrating nuclei‑guided local context and prototype‑guided global propagation. Evaluations on three spatial transcriptomics datasets and ten HEST‑1k cohorts show that BCARP outperforms existing baselines in mean correlation‑based metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of biology‑guided local‑global residual propagation for histology‑to‑transcriptomics prediction.
MIST is a Multi‑context Spatial Transformer that predicts spatial gene expression from H&E images by adding two context pathways to a standard Transformer: a coordinate‑invariant local pathway that attends to spatial k‑nearest‑neighbor spots, and a slide pathway that broadcasts a whole‑slide summary to every spot. In intra‑cohort evaluation across six human organ cohorts, MIST improves mean Pearson correlation by 9.7%–11.6% over the strongest baseline for 10‑, 50‑, and 100‑gene panels, and achieves lower MSE and MAE. It also outperforms baselines in leave‑one‑organ‑out transfer, domain recovery, and reproduces spatial expression patterns of cancer‑marker genes.
arXiv:2608. 14924v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial transcriptomics (ST) links tissue morphology with molecular programs, motivating multimodal pretraining methods that align histology images with gene expression.
arXiv:2607. 09166v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial transcriptomics enables profiling of spatial gene expression but is limited by high cost and low throughput, motivating prediction from H&E histopathology images.
SpaFactor is a lightweight framework that predicts spatial gene expression from hematoxylin and eosin images by fusing central spot visuals with multiscale neighborhood context. It uses a residual MLP to map tissue microenvironment to low‑dimensional latent gene programs, which are decoded into coordinated multi‑gene predictions. Across five public cohorts, SpaFactor outperforms existing methods, especially for spatially variable genes, and better recovers biologically organized spatial patterns.