CellCLIP -- Learning Perturbation Effects in Cell Painting via Text-Guided Contrastive Learning

TL;DR

CellCLIP is a novel contrastive learning framework that aligns cell morphology images with perturbation descriptions, improving interpretability and performance in high-content screening analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a new channel encoding scheme and leverages pre-trained encoders to better relate microscopy images and perturbation text in a unified space.

Findings

Outperforms existing models in cross-modal retrieval tasks.

Achieves better biological relevance in downstream analyses.

Reduces computational requirements significantly.

Abstract

High-content screening (HCS) assays based on high-throughput microscopy techniques such as Cell Painting have enabled the interrogation of cells' morphological responses to perturbations at an unprecedented scale. The collection of such data promises to facilitate a better understanding of the relationships between different perturbations and their effects on cellular state. Towards achieving this goal, recent advances in cross-modal contrastive learning could, in theory, be leveraged to learn a unified latent space that aligns perturbations with their corresponding morphological effects. However, the application of such methods to HCS data is not straightforward due to substantial differences in the semantics of Cell Painting images compared to natural images, and the difficulty of representing different classes of perturbations (e.g., small molecule vs CRISPR gene knockout) in a single latent space. In response to these challenges, here we introduce CellCLIP, a cross-modal contrastive learning framework for HCS data. CellCLIP leverages pre-trained image encoders coupled with a novel channel encoding scheme to better capture relationships between different microscopy channels in image embeddings, along with natural language encoders for representing perturbations. Our framework outperforms current open-source models, demonstrating the best performance in both cross-modal retrieval and biologically meaningful downstream tasks while also achieving significant reductions in computation time.