SpaDiT: diffusion transformer for spatial gene expression prediction using scRNA-seq

The rapid development of spatially resolved transcriptomics (SRT) technologies has provided unprecedented opportunities for exploring the structure of specific organs or tissues. However, these techniques (such as image-based SRT) can achieve single-cell resolution, but can only capture the expression levels of tens to hundreds of genes. Such spatial transcriptomics (ST) data, carrying a large number of undetected genes, have limited its application value. To address the challenge, we develop SpaDiT, a deep learning framework for spatial reconstruction and gene expression prediction using scRNA-seq data. SpaDiT employs scRNA-seq data as an a priori condition and utilizes shared genes between ST and scRNA-seq data as latent representations to construct inputs, thereby facilitating the accurate prediction of gene expression in ST data. SpaDiT enhances the accuracy of spatial gene expression predictions over a variety of spatial transcriptomics datasets. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of SpaDiT by conducting extensive experiments on both seq-based and image-based ST data. We compared SpaDiT with eight highly effective baseline methods and found that our proposed method achieved an 8%-12% improvement in performance across multiple metrics. Source code and all datasets used in this paper are available at https://github.com/wenwenmin/SpaDiT and https://zenodo.org/records/12792074.