Research Appraisals
Evidence-based critical appraisals of the latest medical research, systematically evaluated using Oxford CEBM methodology.
Showing 3 appraisals
Cell reports methods
Spatial multi-omics imputation and embedding with SpaMIE
SpaMIE is a deep graph neural network framework designed to tackle the challenge of multi-section integration in spatial multi-omics (SMO) datasets with systematic missing modalities. Current SMO platforms face limitations such as high cost and limited throughput, leading to many large-scale spatial atlases relying on cost-effective mono-omics measurements while only a few sections are profiled with full multi-omics technologies. This results in heterogeneous modality coverage across tissue sections. SpaMIE offers a two-stage solution. In the first stage, it performs spatially informed cross-modal imputation, enabling accurate inference of missing modalities from mono-omics data. In the second stage, it integrates measured and imputed spatial multi-omics profiles across multiple tissue sections to learn a unified embedding. Benchmarking on simulated and experimental datasets shows that SpaMIE achieves accurate cross-modal imputation, robust multi-section integration, and improved spatial domain identification, providing a flexible and scalable solution for constructing and analyzing SMO atlases.
22 July 2026
Read appraisal →Journal of advanced research
scMapNet: Marker-based cell type annotation of scRNA-seq data via vision transfer learning with tabular-to-image transformations
INTRODUCTION: Identifying cell types is a key step in single-cell RNA sequencing data analysis that aids in understanding cellular heterogeneity and facilitates downstream analyses such as those concerning cell-cell interactions and data integration. Cell-type annotation methods often rely on unsupervised clustering algorithms, followed by manual or automatic annotation via marker genes, which are prone to inefficiency and inconsistency. Supervised methods, while more automated and consistent, have gained remarkable attention because of the rapid growth of large-scale, high-quality single-cell datasets. However, these methods cannot effectively leverage cellular marker knowledge and much unlabelled data. OBJECTIVES: This study aims to introduce a novel deep learning method, scMapNet, which can sufficiently learn cellular marker knowledge and information from unlabelled data. METHODS: scMapNet is a self-supervised deep learning model based on masked autoencoders (MAE) and vision transformer (ViT), which adopts treemap transformations to leverage cell marker information and capture information by pretraining on large amounts of unlabelled data. RESULTS: scMapNet outperforms six competing methods across diverse datasets, excelling in accuracy and batch insensitivity. Moreover, scMapNet can effectively extract attention gene information, providing strong support for cell type identification. The models and codes are available at https://github.com/Yuz7/scMapNet. CONCLUSION: scMapNet shows significant performance in annotation accuracy and batch insensitivity. Besides, this method also has good interpretability and can provide biological insights for researchers.
3 July 2026
Read appraisal →ACS nano
The Use of Deep Learning in RNA Therapeutic Development
Ribonucleic acid (RNA)-based therapeutics have emerged as promising methods of disease treatment due to their ability to target the human genome and influence protein production, their versatility, and their relative lack of toxicity compared to other gene therapies. However, the RNA therapeutic design space is extremely large, encompassing multiple variables, including codon identities, secondary structure, and design of specific regions. RNA therapeutic optimization is difficult due to the impracticality of exploring such a vast design space experimentally. To address this limitation, deep learning methods have been employed to optimize RNA therapeutic development. In this review, we examine the application of deep learning models across three key aspects of RNA therapeutic development (RNA structure prediction, CRISPR activity, and RNA delivery), highlighting major contributions in these fields and analyzing how deep learning model architectures could affect model performance. We then discuss challenges associated with using deep learning for RNA therapeutics, such as computational and data limitations. Finally, we offer perspectives on areas for future exploration, such as emerging model architectures and methods of integration with more advanced high-throughput screening techniques. Ultimately, this review provides an overview of how deep learning is used in RNA therapeutic development and how it can evolve in the future.
24 June 2026
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