Spatial transcriptomics (ST) technologies have revolutionized the study of gene expression patterns in tissues by providing multimodality data in transcriptomic, spatial, and morphological, offering opportunities for understanding tissue biology beyond transcriptomics. However, we identify the modality bias phenomenon in ST data species, i.e., the inconsistent contribution of different modalities to the labels leads to a tendency for the analysis methods to retain the information of the dominant modality. How to mitigate the adverse effects of modality bias to satisfy various downstream tasks remains a fundamental challenge. This paper introduces Multiple-modality Structure Transformation, named MuST, a novel methodology to tackle the challenge. MuST integrates the multi-modality information contained in the ST data effectively into a uniform latent space to provide a foundation for all the downstream tasks. It learns intrinsic local structures by topology discovery strategy and topology fusion loss function to solve the inconsistencies among different modalities. Thus, these topology-based and deep learning techniques provide a solid foundation for a variety of analytical tasks while coordinating different modalities. The effectiveness of MuST is assessed by performance metrics and biological significance. The results show that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods with clear advantages in the precision of identifying and preserving structures of tissues and biomarkers. MuST offers a versatile toolkit for the intricate analysis of complex biological systems.

A team of researchers from the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) have developed a fully automated brain registration method that could be used to segment brain regions of interest in mice. Neuroscientists are always seeking out new methods of exploring the structure and function of different brain regions, which are initially applied on animals but could eventually lead to important discoveries about the organization of the human brain. "My lab aims to reveal how the mammalian brain develops its abilities to process and react to sensory stimuli," Theofanis Karayannis, one of the researchers who carried out the study told Tech Xplore. "Most of the work we do is on the experimental side, utilizing the mouse as a model system and techniques that range from molecular-genetic to functional and anatomical." This study is part of a larger project, which also includes "Exploring Brain-wide Development of Inhibition through Deep Learning," a study in which Karayannis and his colleagues use deep learning algorithms to comprehensively track the so-called inhibitory neurons over time in order to gauge the development of capabilities of the brain at specific points in time.

To uncover the organizational principles governing the human brain, neuroscientists are in need of developing high-throughput methods that can explore the structure and function of distinct brain regions using animal models. The first step towards this goal is to accurately register the regions of interest in a mouse brain, against a standard reference atlas, with minimum human supervision. The second step is to scale this approach to different animal ages, so as to also allow insights into normal and pathological brain development and aging. We introduce here a fully automated convolutional neural network-based method (SeBRe) for registration through Segmenting Brain Regions of interest in mice at different ages. We demonstrate the validity of our method on different mouse brain post-natal (P) developmental time points, across a range of neuronal markers. Our method outperforms the existing brain registration methods, and provides the minimum mean squared error (MSE) score on a mouse brain dataset. We propose that our deep learning-based registration method can (i) accelerate brain-wide exploration of region-specific changes in brain development and (ii) replace the existing complex brain registration methodology, by simply segmenting brain regions of interest for high-throughput brain-wide analysis.