PaSTel: Anchoring Histology in Spatial Transcriptomics via Multi-Scale Hierarchical Bio-Prior Contrastive Pretraining

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.14924v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial transcriptomics (ST) links tissue morphology with molecular programs, motivating multimodal pretraining methods that align histology images with gene expression. However, existing approaches suffer from two key limitations: spatially informative gene selection is often dominated by ubiquitous housekeeping genes, leading to weakly discriminative representations, and independent spot-patch alignment fails to capture spatial dependencies tha