DiffuST: a Latent Diffusion Model for Spatial Transcriptomics Denoising

Spatial transcriptomics technologies have enabled comprehensive measurements of gene expression profiles while retaining spatial information, with most platforms also providing matched pathology images. However, noise resulting from low RNA capture efficiency and experimental steps needed to keep spatial information may corrupt the biological signals and obstruct analyses. Here, we develop a latent diffusion model DiffuST to denoise spatial transcriptomics. DiffuST employs a graph autoencoder and a pre-trained model to extract different-scale features from spatial information and pathology images. Then, a latent diffusion model is leveraged to map different scales of features to the same space for denoising. The evaluation based on various spatial transcriptomics datasets showed the superiority of DiffuST over existing denoising methods. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that DiffuST can enhance downstream analysis of spatial transcriptomics and yield significant biological insights.