Towards Cross-Sample Alignment for Multi-Modal Representation Learning in Spatial Transcriptomics

Abstract

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWThe growing number of spatial transcriptomics (ST) datasets enables comprehensive multi-modal characterization of cell types across diverse biological and clinical contexts. However, integration across patient cohorts remains challenging, as local microenvironment, patient-specific variability, and technical batch effects can dominate signals. Here, we hypothesize that combining specialized transcriptomics correction methods with deep representation learning can jointly align morphology, transcriptomics, and spatial information across multiple tissue samples. This approach benefits from recent transcriptomics and pathology foundation models, projecting cells into a shared embedding space where they cluster by cell type rather than dataset-specific conditions. Applying this framework to 18 skin melanoma, 12 human brain, and 4 lung cancer datasets, we demonstrate that it outperforms conventional batch-correction approaches by 58%, 38%, and 2-fold, respectively. Together, this framework enables efficient integration of multi-modal ST data across modalities and samples, facilitating the systematic discovery of conserved cellular programs and spatial niches while remaining robust to cohort-specific batch effects. Code availabilityhttps://github.com/ratschlab/aestetik