Highlights d Robust method automatically adapting to various unseen experimental scenarios d Deep learning solution for accurate nucleus segmentation without user interaction d Accelerates, improves quality, and reduces complexity of bioimage analysis tasks
Single cell segmentation is typically one of the first and most crucial tasks of image-based cellular analysis. We present a deep learning approach aiming towards a truly general method for localizing nuclei across a diverse range of assays and light microscopy modalities. We outperform the 739 methods submitted to the 2018 Data Science Bowl on images representing a variety of realistic conditions, some of which were not represented in the training data. The key to our approach is to adapt our model to unseen and unlabeled data using image style transfer to generate augmented training samples. This allows the model to recognize nuclei in new and different experiments without requiring expert annotations.Identifying nuclei is the starting point for many microscopy-based cellular analyses. Accurate localization of the nucleus is the basis of a variety of quantitative measurements, but is also a first step for identifying individual cell borders, which enables a multitude of further analyses. Until recently, the dominant approaches for this task have been based on classic image processing algorithms (e.g. CellProfiler 1 ) which were sometimes guided by shape and spatial priors 2 . A drawback of these methods is the need for expert knowledge to properly adjust the parameters, which typically must be re-tuned when experimental conditions change.Recently, deep learning has revolutionized an assortment of tasks in image analysis, from image classification 3 to face recognition 4 , and scene segmentation 5 . It is also responsible for breakthroughs in diagnosing retinal images 6 , classifying skin lesions with superhuman performance 7 , as well as incredible advances in 3D fluorescence image analysis 8 . However, aside from initial works from Caicedo et al. 9 and Van Valen et al. 10 , deep learning has yet to significantly advance nucleus segmentation performance.
To answer major questions of cell biology, it is often essential to understand the complex phenotypic composition of cellular systems precisely. Modern automated microscopes produce vast amounts of images routinely, making manual analysis nearly impossible. Due to their efficiency, machine learning-based analysis software have become essential tools to perform single-cell-level phenotypic analysis of large imaging datasets. However, an important limitation of such methods is that they do not use the information gained from the cellular micro- and macroenvironment: the algorithmic decision is based solely on the local properties of the cell of interest. Here, we present how various features from the surrounding environment contribute to identifying a cell and how such additional information can improve single-cell-level phenotypic image analysis. The proposed methodology was tested for different sizes of Euclidean and nearest neighbour-based cellular environments both on tissue sections and cell cultures. Our experimental data verify that the surrounding area of a cell largely determines its entity. This effect was found to be especially strong for established tissues, while it was somewhat weaker in the case of cell cultures. Our analysis shows that combining local cellular features with the properties of the cell’s neighbourhood significantly improves the accuracy of machine learning-based phenotyping.
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