MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4413900793 · doi:10.1101/2025.08.27.672636

SPAGHETTI leverages massive H&E morphological models for phase contrast microscopy images with a generative deep learning approach

2025· preprint· en· W4413900793 on OpenAlexafffund
Zhi Dong, Chris McIntosh, Gregory W. Schwartz

Bibliographic record

VenuebioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldPhysics and Astronomy
TopicDigital Holography and Microscopy
Canadian institutionsUniversity Health NetworkUniversity of Toronto
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research CouncilSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCanada Research ChairsPrincess Margaret Cancer Foundation
KeywordsPhase contrast microscopyContrast (vision)Generative grammarMicroscopyArtificial intelligenceComputer scienceMorphology (biology)OpticsBiologyPhysicsZoology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Phase contrast microscopy (PCM) is a powerful cell imaging method, one of the few technologies to delineate and track cell structure in live cells without staining. Despite PCM’s great potential and popularity in monitoring live-cell populations, there is a lack of algorithms to extract morphological information from these images due to the lack of large training datasets. To overcome this challenge and enable advanced, high throughput quantitative analysis of PCM images, we introduce SPAGHETTI: a lightweight image translator built on a modified cycle-consistent generative adversarial network. SPAGHETTI translates PCM images into those resembling hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) pathological images which, due to the pervasive and widespread use in clinical settings, are the basis for most large-scale deep learning models for quantitative analyses. We demonstrate that by first using SPAGHETTI to translate PCM images into H&E-like images, we could achieve significantly improved performance on cell segmentation through the use of tissue and H&E-specific cell segmentation models. We also show that by passing translated PCM images across several independent datasets into H&E feature extractor models, we improve the performance of cell-type annotation, experimental media classification, and cell viability prediction. Overall, SPAGHETTI enables many quantitative analyses of PCM that were previously impossible and acts as a valuable preprocessing step to help researchers gather novel information about cell states through the downstream quantitative analysis of morphological features.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.004
Threshold uncertainty score0.008

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0020.002
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.256
Teacher spread0.238 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venuebioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)Same topicDigital Holography and MicroscopyFrench-language works237,207