A contrastive learning approach to integrate spatial transcriptomics and histological images

Autor: Yu Lin, Yanchun Liang, Duolin Wang, Yuzhou Chang, Qin Ma, Yan Wang, Fei He, Dong Xu
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2024
Předmět:
Zdroj: Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, Vol 23, Iss , Pp 1786-1795 (2024)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2001-0370
DOI: 10.1016/j.csbj.2024.04.039
Popis: The rapid growth of spatially resolved transcriptomics technology provides new perspectives on spatial tissue architecture. Deep learning has been widely applied to derive useful representations for spatial transcriptome analysis. However, effectively integrating spatial multi-modal data remains challenging. Here, we present ConGcR, a contrastive learning-based model for integrating gene expression, spatial location, and tissue morphology for data representation and spatial tissue architecture identification. Graph convolution and ResNet were used as encoders for gene expression with spatial location and histological image inputs, respectively. We further enhanced ConGcR with a graph auto-encoder as ConGaR to better model spatially embedded representations. We validated our models using 16 human brains, four chicken hearts, eight breast tumors, and 30 human lung spatial transcriptomics samples. The results showed that our models generated more effective embeddings for obtaining tissue architectures closer to the ground truth than other methods. Overall, our models not only can improve tissue architecture identification’s accuracy but also may provide valuable insights and effective data representation for other tasks in spatial transcriptome analyses.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals