Point Supervised Extended Scenario Nuclear Analysis Framework Based on LSTM-CFCN

Abstract

Cells and cell like particles detection and segmentation are of significant interest to many biological and clinical studies. Traditionally, these tasks are usually performed by visual inspection, which is time consuming, labor intensity and prone to induce subjective bias between different people. These make automatic cell analysis protocols essential for large-scale and objective studies. In recent years, imaging technical has been significantly advanced following the great success by computer vision. In addition, these technologies enable the cross module microscopy analysis, and make the task of cell analysis extremely challenging. Over these decades, computer aided cell detection, counting and segmentation have evolved from earlier filter based methods to the state-of-art deep learning protocols. However, there are still few suitable frameworks that can process multiple source cell images at the same time. In this paper, we seek a different route and propose a novel efficient framework for robust cell analysis based on Long Short Term Memory Channeled Fully Convolution Neural Networks (LSTM-CFCN). The results demonstrates that our framework is able to perform most of cell detection, counting and segmentation tasks from different cell type, and it can also cover most kinds of microscopy images scenarios including dark field, bright field, pathological and electron images. We have perform substantial experiments on several benchmark datasets, the LSTM-CFCN achieves the highest or at least top-2 performance in terms of F1-score, compared with other state-of-the-art methods. INDEX TERMS Cell analysis, LSTM-CFCN, multi-task learning, multi-scale image processing.