Accurately counting the number of cells in microscopy images is required in many medical diagnosis and biological studies. This task is tedious, time-consuming, and prone to subjective errors. However, designing automatic counting methods remains challenging due to low image contrast, complex background, large variance in cell shapes and counts, and significant cell occlusions in two-dimensional microscopy images. In this study, we proposed a new density regression-based method for automatically counting cells in microscopy images. The proposed method processes two innovations compared to other state-of-the-art density regression-based methods. First, the density regression model (DRM) is designed as a concatenated fully convolutional regression network (C-FCRN) to employ multi-scale image features for the estimation of cell density maps from given images. Second, auxiliary convolutional neural networks (AuxCNNs) are employed to assist in the training of intermediate layers of the designed C-FCRN to improve the DRM performance on unseen datasets. Experimental studies evaluated on four datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.
Cell counting is a ubiquitous, yet tedious task that would greatly benefit from automation. From basic biological questions to clinical trials, cell counts provide key quantitative feedback that drive research. Unfortunately, cell counting is most commonly a manual task and can be time-intensive. The task is made even more difficult due to overlapping cells, existence of multiple focal planes, and poor imaging quality, among other factors. Here, we describe a convolutional neural network approach, using a recently described feature pyramid network combined with a VGG-style neural network, for …
Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, v.v.i.（捷克科学院物理研究所）；Regional Centre of Advanced Technologies and Materials, Palacký University（帕拉茨基大学先进技术与材料区域中心）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）
Scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopies (STM/nc-AFM) are rapidly progressing to offer unprecedented spatial resolution of a diverse array of chemical species. In particular, they are employed to characterize on-surface chemical reactions by directly examining precursors and products. Chiral effects and self-assembled structures can also be investigated. This open source, modular, python based scheme automates the categorization of a variety of molecules present in medium sized (10$\times$10 to 100$\times$100 nm) scanned probe images.
Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is one of the most common forms of intratumoral heterogeneity in the study of renal cancer. ccRCC originates from the epithelial lining of proximal convoluted renal tubules. These cells undergo abnormal mutations in the presence of Ki67 protein and create a lump-like structure through cell proliferation. Manual counting of tumor cells in the tissue-affected sections is one of the strongest prognostic markers for renal cancer. However, this procedure is time-consuming and also prone to subjectivity. These assessments are based on the physical cell appeara…
Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto（波尔图大学理学院）
Analysis of microscopy images is one important tool in many fields of biomedical research, as it allows the quantification of a multitude of parameters at the cellular level. However, manual counting of these images is both tiring and unreliable and ultimately very time-consuming for biomedical researchers. Not only does this slow down the overall research process, it also introduces counting errors due to a lack of objectivity and consistency inherent to the researchers own human nature. This thesis addresses this issue by automatically determining infection indexes of macrophages parasite by…
MicroscopyMatching: Towards a Ready-to-use Framework for Microscopy Image Analysis in Diverse Conditions
School of Computing and Communications（计算与通信学院）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；Department of Cell Biology（细胞生物学系）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology（分子与细胞生物学系）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University（阿卜杜勒·卡拉姆技术大学）
Every year millions of people die due to disease of Cancer. Due to its invasive nature it is very complex to cure even in primary stages. Hence, only method to survive this disease completely is via forecasting by analyzing the early mutation in cells of the patient biopsy. Cell Segmentation can be used to find cell which have left their nuclei. This enables faster cure and high rate of survival. Cell counting is a hard, yet tedious task that would greatly benefit from automation. To accomplish this task, segmentation of cells need to be accurate. In this paper, we have improved the learning o…
Cornea cell count is an important diagnostic tool commonly used by practitioners to assess the health of a patient's cornea. Unfortunately, clinical specular microscopy requires the acquisition of a large number of images at different focus depths because the curved shape of the cornea makes it impossible to acquire a single all-in-focus image. This paper describes two methods and their implementations to reduce the number of images required to run a cell-counting algorithm, thus shortening the duration of the examination and increasing the patient's comfort. The basic idea is to apply de-blur…
In this paper, we present UNet++, a new, more powerful architecture for medical image segmentation. Our architecture is essentially a deeply-supervised encoder-decoder network where the encoder and decoder sub-networks are connected through a series of nested, dense skip pathways. The re-designed skip pathways aim at reducing the semantic gap between the feature maps of the encoder and decoder sub-networks. We argue that the optimizer would deal with an easier learning task when the feature maps from the decoder and encoder networks are semantically similar. We have evaluated UNet++ in compari…
Topological texture analysis of microscopy images of dynamic casein gelation and its relation to rheological properties
Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark（哥本哈根大学计算机科学系）；Department of Green Technology, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark（南丹麦大学绿色技术系）；Department of Food Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark（哥本哈根大学食品科学系）
OpenQlaw: An Agentic AI Assistant for Analysis of 2D Quantum Materials
Quantum AI Lab, University of Arkansas, USA（量子人工智能实验室，美国亚拉巴马大学）；University of Utah, USA（美国犹他大学）；Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, USA（美国亚拉巴马大学物理系）；MonARK NSF Quantum Foundry（MonARK NSF 量子熔炉）
Oxford Brookes University（牛津布鲁克斯大学）；Vellore Institute of Technology（韦洛尔理工学院）
Tuberculosis is a contagious disease which is one of the leading causes of death, globally. The general diagnosis methods for tuberculosis include microscopic examination, tuberculin skin test, culture method, enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and electronic nose system. World Health Organization (WHO) recommends standard microscopic examination for early diagnosis of tuberculosis. In microscopy, the technician examines field of views (FOVs) in sputum smear for presence of any TB bacilli and counts the number of TB bacilli per FOV to report the level of severity. This process is time c…
Image segmentation is one of the most essential biomedical image processing problems for different imaging modalities, including microscopy and X-ray in the Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) domain. However, annotating biomedical images is knowledge-driven, time-consuming, and labor-intensive, making it difficult to obtain abundant labels with limited costs. Active learning strategies come into ease the burden of human annotation, which queries only a subset of training data for annotation. Despite receiving attention, most of active learning methods generally still require huge computational …
