KAFSTExp: Kernel Adaptive Filtering With Nyström Approximation for Predicting Spatial Gene Expression From Histology Images
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spatial transcriptomics (ST), known as an expensive medical examination, plays an important role in analyzing the spatial heterogeneity of tumors. When considering the correlation between tissue morphological patterns and gene profiles, predicting corresponding gene expression from pathology images obtained from affordable biopsies is regarded as an instantaneous and cost-effective alternative. However, accurately modeling the complex and nonlinear relationship between histological features and gene expression remains challenging. Existing deep learning models often struggle to generalize on limited ST datasets due to their large and overparameterized architectures. The primary advantage of kernel adaptive filtering (KAF) lies in its ability to transform a challenging nonlinear problem arising in the original space into a linear regression problem in the higher-dimensional feature space via kernel methods. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework called KAFSTExp, which utilizes the state-of-the-art pathology foundation model UNI to extract image feature vectors, and then introduces the kernel least mean square algorithm with Nyström approximation to predict the normalized transcript counts of specific genes. Extensive experiments show that KAFSTExp significantly improves prediction accuracy while reducing computational cost and training time. KAFSTExp demonstrates consistent performance gains across multiple ST datasets, achieving relative improvements in Pearson correlation coefficient ranging from 1.24% to 94.23%, with an average increase of 19.80% over the best-performing non-KAF methods. External validation and further clinical analysis confirm the generalization performance and clinical application value of the proposed KAFSTExp.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".