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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 OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.604
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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