Deep learning-based recognition of cell structures in fluorescence microscopy sequences with respect to their morphology on cells infected with Marburg virus

Abstract

The Institute of Virology at the Philipps-Universität Marburg is currently researching possible drugs to combat the Marburg virus. This involves classifying cell structures based on fluoroscopic microscopic image sequences. Conventionally, membranes of cells must be marked for better analysis, which is time consuming. In this work, an approach is presented to identify cell structures in images that are marked for subviral particles. It could be shown that there is a correlation between the distribution of subviral particles in an infected cell and the position of the cell’s structures. The segmentation is performed with a "Mask-R-CNN" algorithm, presented in this work. The model (a region-based convolutional neural network) is applied to enable a robust and fast recognition of cell structures. Furthermore, the network architecture is described. The proposed method is tested on data evaluated by experts. The results show a high potential and demonstrate that the method is suitable.