CHRep: Cross-modal Histology Representation and Post-hoc Calibration for Spatial Gene Expression Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Changfan, Wang, Xinran, Liu, Donghai, Su, Fei, Sun, Lulu, Zhao, Zhicheng, Meng, Zhu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908989509337088
author Wang, Changfan
Wang, Xinran
Liu, Donghai
Su, Fei
Sun, Lulu
Zhao, Zhicheng
Meng, Zhu
author_facet Wang, Changfan
Wang, Xinran
Liu, Donghai
Su, Fei
Sun, Lulu
Zhao, Zhicheng
Meng, Zhu
contents Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables spatially resolved gene profiling but remains expensive and low-throughput, limiting large-cohort studies and routine clinical use. Predicting spatial gene expression from routine hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) slides is a promising alternative, yet under realistic leave-one-slide-out evaluation, existing models often suffer from slide-level appearance shifts and regression-driven over-smoothing that suppress biologically meaningful variation. CHRep is a two-phase framework for robust histology-to-expression prediction. In the training phase, CHRep learns a structure-aware representation by jointly optimizing correlation-aware regression, symmetric image-expression alignment, and coordinate-induced spatial topology regularization. In the inference phase, cross-slide robustness is improved without backbone fine-tuning through a lightweight calibration module trained on the training slides, which combines a non-parametric estimate from a training gallery with a magnitude-regularized correction module. Unlike prior embedding-alignment or retrieval-based transfer methods that rely on a single prediction route, CHRep couples topology-preserving representation learning with post-hoc calibration, enabling stable neighborhood retrieval and controlled bias correction under slide-level shifts. Across the three cohorts, CHRep consistently improves gene-wise correlation under leave-one-slide-out evaluation, with the largest gains observed on Alex+10x. Relative to HAGE, the Pearson correlation coefficient on all considered genes [PCC(ACG)] increases by 4.0% on cSCC and 9.8% on HER2+. Relative to mclSTExp, PCC(ACG) further improves by 39.5% on Alex+10x, together with 9.7% and 9.0% reductions in mean squared error (MSE) and mean absolute error (MAE), respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_21573
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CHRep: Cross-modal Histology Representation and Post-hoc Calibration for Spatial Gene Expression Prediction
Wang, Changfan
Wang, Xinran
Liu, Donghai
Su, Fei
Sun, Lulu
Zhao, Zhicheng
Meng, Zhu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Quantitative Methods
Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables spatially resolved gene profiling but remains expensive and low-throughput, limiting large-cohort studies and routine clinical use. Predicting spatial gene expression from routine hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) slides is a promising alternative, yet under realistic leave-one-slide-out evaluation, existing models often suffer from slide-level appearance shifts and regression-driven over-smoothing that suppress biologically meaningful variation. CHRep is a two-phase framework for robust histology-to-expression prediction. In the training phase, CHRep learns a structure-aware representation by jointly optimizing correlation-aware regression, symmetric image-expression alignment, and coordinate-induced spatial topology regularization. In the inference phase, cross-slide robustness is improved without backbone fine-tuning through a lightweight calibration module trained on the training slides, which combines a non-parametric estimate from a training gallery with a magnitude-regularized correction module. Unlike prior embedding-alignment or retrieval-based transfer methods that rely on a single prediction route, CHRep couples topology-preserving representation learning with post-hoc calibration, enabling stable neighborhood retrieval and controlled bias correction under slide-level shifts. Across the three cohorts, CHRep consistently improves gene-wise correlation under leave-one-slide-out evaluation, with the largest gains observed on Alex+10x. Relative to HAGE, the Pearson correlation coefficient on all considered genes [PCC(ACG)] increases by 4.0% on cSCC and 9.8% on HER2+. Relative to mclSTExp, PCC(ACG) further improves by 39.5% on Alex+10x, together with 9.7% and 9.0% reductions in mean squared error (MSE) and mean absolute error (MAE), respectively.
title CHRep: Cross-modal Histology Representation and Post-hoc Calibration for Spatial Gene Expression Prediction
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21573