bibtext: @InProceedings{ Wan_Crossmodal_MICCAI2024,
                   author = { Wang, Xiaofei and Huang, Xingxu and Price, Stephen and Li, Chao },
                   title = { { Cross-modal Diffusion Modelling for Super-resolved Spatial Transcriptomics } },
                   booktitle = {Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention -- MICCAI 2024},
                   year = {2024},
                   publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
                   volume = { LNCS 15003 },
                   month = {October},
                   pages = { pending },
                }
abstract: The recent advancement of spatial transcriptomics (ST) allows to characterize spatial gene expression within tissue for discovery research. However, current ST platforms suffer from low resolution, hindering in-depth understanding of spatial gene expression. Super-resolution approaches promise to enhance ST maps by integrating histology images with gene expressions of profiled tissue spots. However, current super-resolution methods are limited by restoration uncertainty and mode collapse. Although diffusion models have shown promise in capturing complex interactions between multi-modal conditions, it remains a challenge to integrate histology images and gene expression for super-resolved ST maps. This paper proposes a cross-modal conditional diffusion model for super-resolving ST maps with the guidance of histology images. Specifically, we design a multi-modal disentangling network with cross-modal adaptive modulation to utilize complementary information from histology images and spatial gene expression. Moreover, we propose a dynamic cross-attention modelling strategy to extract hierarchical cell-to-tissue information from histology images. Lastly, we propose a co-expression-based gene-correlation graph network to model the co-expression relationship of multiple genes. Experiments show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in ST super-resolution on three public datasets.
title: Cross-modal Diffusion Modelling for Super-resolved Spatial Transcriptomics
authors: Wang, Xiaofei Huang, Xingxu Price, Stephen Li, Chao