Self-supervised clustering analysis of colorectal cancer biomarkers based on multi-scale whole slides image and mass spectrometry imaging fused images

Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is widely used for unlabeled molecular co-localization in biological samples and is also commonly used for screening cancer biomarkers. The main issues affecting the screening of cancer biomarkers are: 1) low-resolution MSI and pathological slices cannot be accurately matched; 2) a large amount of MSI data cannot be directly analyzed without manual annotation. This paper proposes a self-supervised cluster analysis method for colorectal cancer biomarkers based on multi-scale whole slide images (WSI) and MSI fusion images without manual annotation, which can accurately determine the correlation between molecules and lesion areas. This paper uses the combination of WSI multi-scale high-resolution and MSI high-dimensional data to obtain high-resolution fusion images. This method can observe the spatial distribution of molecules in pathological slices and use this method as an evaluation index for self-supervised screening of cancer biomarkers. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this chapter can train the image fusion model with a small amount of MSI and WSI data, and the mean Pixel Accuracy (mPA) and mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) evaluation metrics of the fused images can reach 0.9587 and 0.8745. And self-supervised clustering using MSI features and fused image features can obtain good classification results, and the precision, recall, and F1-score values of the self-supervised model reach 0.9074, 0.9065, and 0.9069, respectively. This method effectively combines the advantages of WSI and MSI, which will significantly expand the application scenarios of MSI and facilitate the screening of disease markers.