Optics and Precision Engineering, Volume. 33, Issue 9, 1456(2025)

Hierarchical feature refinement with frequency-enhanced learning method for nuclei segmentation in spatial omics

Xiuqi LI1,2, Jinze LI1,2, Qi YANG2, Yingxue LI2, Cairong ZHAO3, Lianqun ZHOU1,2、*, and Jia YAO1,2、*
Author Affiliations
  • 1Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, School of Biomedical Engineering (Suzhou), University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei230026, China
  • 2Key Laboratory of Biomedical Detection Technology, Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou15163, China
  • 3College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai201804, China
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    Accurate mapping of biomolecular information onto tissue section image coordinates is a fundamental requirement in spatial multi-omics analysis, where the precision of nuclei segmentation critically determines the accuracy of target molecule localization. However, existing segmentation methods frequently produce suboptimal outcomes due to challenges such as highly heterogeneous nuclear morphology, complex tissue architecture, and densely packed cellular regions, all of which compromise the reliability of downstream spatial genomics analyses. To overcome these challenges, FFVM-UKAN, a novel encoder-decoder architecture, is proposed. This architecture integrates shallow Visual State Space modules for feature extraction with a deep tokenized Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for feature refinement. Additionally, a Parallel Frequency Domain Learnable Module is incorporated to significantly enhance skip connections by effectively capturing fine-grained frequency-level features essential for high-precision nuclei segmentation. The proposed method achieved a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 69.09% and a Dice coefficient of 81.72% on the MoNuSeg dataset, and 85.95% and 92.45% respectively on an in-house dataset. Further validation using the 10X Genomics human liver dataset for gene-to-nuclei mapping yielded an accuracy of 90.63%. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach delivers superior nuclei segmentation accuracy and robust model generalization. This enables highly precise gene-to-nuclei mapping, underscoring the significant potential of this method to advance spatial multi-omics research and its applications.

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    Xiuqi LI, Jinze LI, Qi YANG, Yingxue LI, Cairong ZHAO, Lianqun ZHOU, Jia YAO. Hierarchical feature refinement with frequency-enhanced learning method for nuclei segmentation in spatial omics[J]. Optics and Precision Engineering, 2025, 33(9): 1456

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    Paper Information

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    Received: Jan. 9, 2025

    Accepted: --

    Published Online: Jul. 22, 2025

    The Author Email: Lianqun ZHOU (zhoulq@sibet.ac.cn)

    DOI:10.37188/OPE.20253309.1456

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