Tera-MIND: Tera-scale mouse brain simulation via spatial mRNA-guided diffusion

1Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Basel, Switzerland. 2Department of Pathology and Molecular Pathology, University Hospital, University of Zurich, Switzerland. 3Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. 4Integrated System Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. 5Institute of Medical Genetics and Pathology, University Hospital Basel, Switzerland.
*Corresponding author
Code arXiv

Conceptual illustration of Tera-MIND.

Abstract

Holistic 3D modeling of molecularly defined brain structures is crucial for understanding complex brain functions. Emerging tissue profiling technologies enable the construction of a comprehensive atlas of the mammalian brain with sub-cellular resolution and spatially resolved gene expression data. However, such tera-scale volumetric datasets present significant computational challenges in understanding complex brain functions within their native 3D spatial context. Here, we propose the novel generative approach Tera-MIND, which can simulate Tera-scale Mouse braINs in 3D using a patch-based and boundary-aware Diffusion model. Taking spatial transcriptomic data as the conditional input, we generate virtual mouse brains with comprehensive cellular morphological detail at teravoxel scale. Through the lens of 3D gene-gene self-attention, we identify spatial molecular interactions for key transcriptomic pathways in the murine brain, exemplified by glutamatergic and dopaminergic neuronal systems. Importantly, these in-silico biological findings are consistent and reproducible across three tera-scale virtual mouse brains. Therefore, Tera-MIND showcases a promising path toward efficient and generative simulations of whole organ systems for biomedical research.

The generation of three tera-scale mouse brains using spatial gene expression as the conditional input.

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3D gene-gene attention map of GLUT and DOPA pathways across three brain instances.

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