ChAda-ViT : Channel Adaptive Attention for Joint Representation Learning of Heterogeneous Microscopy Images
Authors: Nicolas Bourriez, Ihab Bendidi, Ethan Cohen, Gabriel Watkinson, Maxime Sanchez, Guillaume Bollot, Auguste Genovesio

Unlike color photography images which are consistently encoded into RGB channels biological images encompass various modalities where the type of microscopy and the meaning of each channel varies with each experiment. Importantly the number of channels can range from one to a dozen and their correlation is often comparatively much lower than RGB as each of them brings specific information content. This aspect is largely overlooked by methods designed out of the bioimage field and current solutions mostly focus on intra-channel spatial attention often ignoring the relationship between channels yet crucial in most biological applications. Importantly the variable channel type and count prevent the projection of several experiments to a unified representation for large scale pre-training. In this study we propose ChAda-ViT a novel Channel Adaptive Vision Transformer architecture employing an Inter-Channel Attention mechanism on images with an arbitrary number order and type of channels. We also introduce IDRCell100k a bioimage dataset with a rich set of 79 experiments covering 7 microscope modalities with a multitude of channel types and channel counts varying from 1 to 10 per experiment. Our proposed architecture trained in a self-supervised manner outperforms existing approaches in several biologically relevant downstream tasks. Additionally it can be used to bridge the gap for the first time between assays with different microscopes channel numbers or types by embedding various image and experimental modalities into a unified biological image representation. The latter should facilitate interdisciplinary studies and pave the way for better adoption of deep learning in biological image-based analyses.