Synthetic whole-slide image tile generation with gene expression profile-infused deep generative models. Cell reports methods Carrillo-Perez, F., Pizurica, M., Ozawa, M. G., Vogel, H., West, R. B., Kong, C. S., Herrera, L. J., Shen, J., Gevaert, O. 2023; 3 (8): 100534

Abstract

In this work, we propose an approach to generate whole-slide image (WSI) tiles by using deep generative models infused with matched gene expression profiles. First, we train a variational autoencoder (VAE) that learns a latent, lower-dimensional representation of multi-tissue gene expression profiles. Then, we use this representation to infuse generative adversarial networks (GANs) that generate lung and brain cortex tissue tiles, resulting in a new model that we call RNA-GAN. Tiles generated by RNA-GAN were preferred by expert pathologists compared with tiles generated using traditional GANs, and in addition, RNA-GAN needs fewer training epochs to generate high-quality tiles. Finally, RNA-GAN was able to generalize to gene expression profiles outside of the training set, showing imputation capabilities. A web-based quiz is available for users to play a game distinguishing real and synthetic tiles: https://rna-gan.stanford.edu/, and the code for RNA-GAN is available here: https://github.com/gevaertlab/RNA-GAN.

View details for DOI 10.1016/j.crmeth.2023.100534

View details for PubMedID 37671024