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Abstract - INST-Align: Implicit Neural Alignment for Spatial Transcriptomics via Canonical Expression Fields
Spatial transcriptomics (ST) measures mRNA expression while preserving spatial organization, but multi-slice analysis faces two coupled difficulties: large non-rigid deformations across slices and inter-slice batch effects when alignment and integration are treated independently. We present INST-Align, an unsupervised pairwise framework that couples a coordinate-based deformation network with a shared Canonical Expression Field, an implicit neural representation mapping spatial coordinates to expression embeddings, for joint alignment and reconstruction. A two-phase training strategy first establishes a stable canonical embedding space and then jointly optimizes deformation and spatial-feature matching, enabling mutually constrained alignment and representation learning. Cross-slice parameter sharing of the canonical field regularizes ambiguous correspondences and absorbs batch variation. Across nine datasets, INST-Align achieves state-of-the-art mean OT Accuracy (0.702), NN Accuracy (0.719), and Chamfer distance, with Chamfer reductions of up to 94.9\% on large-deformation sections relative to the strongest baseline. The framework also yields biologically meaningful spatial embeddings and coherent 3D tissue reconstruction. The code will be released after review phase.
INST-Align:通过规范表达场实现空间转录组学的隐式神经对齐 /
INST-Align: Implicit Neural Alignment for Spatial Transcriptomics via Canonical Expression Fields
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这篇论文提出了一种名为INST-Align的无监督方法,它通过一个共享的‘规范表达场’神经网络,将不同切片的空间坐标映射到统一的基因表达特征,从而同时解决了空间转录组学切片间的大变形对齐与批次效应消除两大难题,在多个数据集上取得了优异的对齐和重建效果。