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GeneQuery: Generalized Gene Expression Prediction from Histology Images via Image-Gene QA

2025· article· W7126065224 on OpenAlexaff
Ying Xiong, Linjing Liu, Yufei Cui, Shangyu Wu, Xue Liu, Antoni B. Chan

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Language
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicCell Image Analysis Techniques
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGeneralityFocus (optics)Gene expressionGene expression profilingExpression (computer science)GeneMechanism (biology)Spatial analysis

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Gene expression profiling provides profound insights into molecular mechanisms, but its time-consuming and costly nature often presents significant challenges. Recent advancements have utilized histological images to predict spatially resolved gene expression profiles. The gene prediction problem has two main characteristics, i.e., spatial heterogeneity and gene interdependency. Existing works only focus on addressing spatial heterogeneity, ignoring the importance of relationships between genes. To address the above limitation, this paper presents GeneQuery, which aims to solve this gene expression prediction task in a question-answering (QA) manner for better generality and flexibility. Specifically, GeneQuery takes gene meta-information as queries and whole-slide images as contexts and then predicts the queried gene expression values. GeneQuery learns to dynamically fuse spatial image features with gene semantics, and uses an attention mechanism to explicitly capture the spatial information and a shared regressor to implicitly capture the gene relationship. A variant of GeneQuery can use the attention mechanism to capture gene relationships for more complex tissue cases. This QA-based reformulation also grants the model the ability to generalize, enabling the prediction of unseen gene expression without requiring model retraining. Comprehensive experiments on spatial transcriptomics datasets show that the proposed GeneQuery outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on known and unseen genes. More results also demonstrate that GeneQuery can help analyze the tissue structure.

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)0.003
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: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.007
Threshold uncertainty score0.015

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.002

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 head0.005
GPT teacher head0.250
Teacher spread0.245 · 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 routes1
Has abstractyes

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