Spatial Transcriptomics as Images for Large-Scale Pretraining

arXiv:2603.13432v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) profiles thousands of gene expression values at discrete spots with precise coordinates on tissue sections, preserving spatial context essential for clinical and pathological studies. With rising sequencing throughput and advancing platforms, the expanding data volumes motivate large-scale ST pretraining. However, the fundamental unit for pretraining, i.e., what constitutes a single training sample, remains il