Matek, C. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2026

Pan-cancer virtual spatial transcriptomics from routine histology with Phoenix

Spatial transcriptomics links gene expression to tissue architecture, providing a mechanistic view of cellular organization. Yet existing datasets cover few donors and miss the complexity of human disease. Experimental costs remain prohibitive, and large-scale profiling is impractically slow for population-level studies. Accurate computational methods are urgently needed. Predicting gene expression from standard histology, however, remains an open problem, as current approaches transfer poorly to unseen cohorts and diseases. Here, we present Phoenix, a (latent) flow matching generative model that infers pan-cancer spatially resolved single-cell gene expression with high accuracy. Phoenix analyzes treatment response in silico: Applied to 763 head and neck cancer patients, it identified three new spatial biomarkers that we validated across two cancers (breast cancer, n = 84; ovarian cancer, n = 157) and treatment regimens (platinum, trastuzumab). Phoenix generalizes beyond carcinomas: In a large sarcoma cohort (802 tissue microarray cores), it accurately predicted cell-type-specific signatures in held-out samples and captured chemotherapy-induced immune remodeling. Phoenix also extends across species: In a mouse model, it accurately predicted the expression of pancreatic cancer lineage markers and the mutant mKras^G12D allele in silico. In total, we evaluated Phoenix on over 10,000 patients. Our results establish virtual spatial transcriptomics as a scalable framework for studying tissue organization, therapeutic response, and disease mechanisms.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2019

Human-level recognition of blast cells in acute myeloid leukemia with convolutional neural networks

Reliable recognition of malignant white blood cells is a key step in the diagnosis of hematologic malignancies such as Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Microscopic morphological examination of blood cells is usually performed by trained human examiners, making the process tedious, time-consuming and hard to standardise. We compile an annotated image dataset of over 18,000 white blood cells, use it to train a convolutional neural network for leukocyte classification, and evaluate the networks performance. The network classifies the most important cell types with high accuracy. It also allows us to decide two clinically relevant questions with human-level performance, namely (i) if a given cell has blast character, and (ii) if it belongs to the cell types normally present in non-pathological blood smears. Our approach holds the potential to be used as a classification aid for examining much larger numbers of cells in a smear than can usually be done by a human expert. This will allow clinicians to recognize malignant cell populations with lower prevalence at an earlier stage of the disease.

pathology↗