GeneQuery: A General QA-based Framework for Spatial Gene Expression Predictions from Histology Images

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xiong, Ying, Liu, Linjing, Cui, Yufei, Wu, Shangyu, Liu, Xue, Chan, Antoni B., Xue, Chun Jason
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Xiong, Ying
Liu, Linjing
Cui, Yufei
Wu, Shangyu
Liu, Xue
Chan, Antoni B.
Xue, Chun Jason
author_facet Xiong, Ying
Liu, Linjing
Cui, Yufei
Wu, Shangyu
Liu, Xue
Chan, Antoni B.
Xue, Chun Jason
contents Gene expression profiling provides profound insights into molecular mechanisms, but its time-consuming and costly nature often presents significant challenges. In contrast, whole-slide hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained histological images are readily accessible and allow for detailed examinations of tissue structure and composition at the microscopic level. Recent advancements have utilized these histological images to predict spatially resolved gene expression profiles. However, state-of-the-art works treat gene expression prediction as a multi-output regression problem, where each gene is learned independently with its own weights, failing to capture the shared dependencies and co-expression patterns between genes. Besides, existing works can only predict gene expression values for genes seen during training, limiting their ability to generalize to new, unseen genes. To address the above limitations, this paper presents GeneQuery, which aims to solve this gene expression prediction task in a question-answering (QA) manner for better generality and flexibility. Specifically, GeneQuery takes gene-related texts as queries and whole-slide images as contexts and then predicts the queried gene expression values. With such a transformation, GeneQuery can implicitly estimate the gene distribution by introducing the gene random variable. Besides, the proposed GeneQuery consists of two architecture implementations, i.e., spot-aware GeneQuery for capturing patterns between images and gene-aware GeneQuery for capturing patterns between genes. Comprehensive experiments on spatial transcriptomics datasets show that the proposed GeneQuery outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on known and unseen genes. More results also demonstrate that GeneQuery can potentially analyze the tissue structure.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_18391
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GeneQuery: A General QA-based Framework for Spatial Gene Expression Predictions from Histology Images
Xiong, Ying
Liu, Linjing
Cui, Yufei
Wu, Shangyu
Liu, Xue
Chan, Antoni B.
Xue, Chun Jason
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Gene expression profiling provides profound insights into molecular mechanisms, but its time-consuming and costly nature often presents significant challenges. In contrast, whole-slide hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained histological images are readily accessible and allow for detailed examinations of tissue structure and composition at the microscopic level. Recent advancements have utilized these histological images to predict spatially resolved gene expression profiles. However, state-of-the-art works treat gene expression prediction as a multi-output regression problem, where each gene is learned independently with its own weights, failing to capture the shared dependencies and co-expression patterns between genes. Besides, existing works can only predict gene expression values for genes seen during training, limiting their ability to generalize to new, unseen genes. To address the above limitations, this paper presents GeneQuery, which aims to solve this gene expression prediction task in a question-answering (QA) manner for better generality and flexibility. Specifically, GeneQuery takes gene-related texts as queries and whole-slide images as contexts and then predicts the queried gene expression values. With such a transformation, GeneQuery can implicitly estimate the gene distribution by introducing the gene random variable. Besides, the proposed GeneQuery consists of two architecture implementations, i.e., spot-aware GeneQuery for capturing patterns between images and gene-aware GeneQuery for capturing patterns between genes. Comprehensive experiments on spatial transcriptomics datasets show that the proposed GeneQuery outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on known and unseen genes. More results also demonstrate that GeneQuery can potentially analyze the tissue structure.
title GeneQuery: A General QA-based Framework for Spatial Gene Expression Predictions from Histology Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.18391