A comparative study of semi- and self-supervised semantic segmentation of biomedical microscopy data
TU Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）；AICURA medical GmbH（AICURA医疗有限公司）；National Center of Tumor Diseases (NCT)（国家肿瘤疾病中心）；Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences（马克斯·普朗克人类认知与脑科学研究所）
Nastassya Horlava, Alisa Mironenko, Sebastian Niehaus, Sebastian Wagner, Ingo Roeder, Nico Scherf
In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the state-of-the-art method for biomedical image analysis. However, these networks are usually trained in a supervised manner, requiring large amounts of labelled training data. These labelled data sets are often difficult to acquire in the biomedical domain. In this work, we validate alternative ways to train CNNs with fewer labels for biomedical image segmentation using. We adapt two semi- and self-supervised image classification methods and analyse their performance for semantic segmentation of biomedical microscopy images.
Over the past decade, deep learning (DL) research in computer vision has been growing rapidly, with many advances in DL-based image analysis methods for biomedical problems. In this work, we introduce MMV_Im2Im, a new open-source python package for image-to-image transformation in bioimaging applications. MMV_Im2Im is designed with a generic image-to-image transformation framework that can be used for a wide range of tasks, including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, image restoration, and image generation, etc.. Our implementation takes advantage of state-of-the-art machine learni…
Going Beyond U-Net: Assessing Vision Transformers for Semantic Segmentation in Microscopy Image Analysis
Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu（塔尔图大学计算机科学研究所）；Center for Artificial Intelligence, Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt（维尔茨堡-施韦因富特应用技术大学人工智能中心）；STACC
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics（马克斯·普朗克分子细胞生物学与遗传学研究所）；Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD)（德累斯顿系统生物学中心）；IT4Innovations, VŠB - Technical University of Ostrava（IT4Innovations，俄斯特拉发技术大学）；Fondatione Human Technopole（人类技术基金会）
Automatic detection and segmentation of objects in 2D and 3D microscopy data is important for countless biomedical applications. In the natural image domain, spatial embedding-based instance segmentation methods are known to yield high-quality results, but their utility for segmenting microscopy data is currently little researched. Here we introduce EmbedSeg, an embedding-based instance segmentation method which outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines on 2D as well as 3D microscopy datasets. Additionally, we show that EmbedSeg has a GPU memory footprint small enough to train even on la…
Segmentation in large-scale cellular electron microscopy with deep learning: A literature survey
Bernoulli Institute of Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University Groningen（格罗宁根大学伯努利数学、计算机科学与人工智能研究所）；University Groningen（格罗宁根大学）；University Medical Center Groningen（格罗宁根大学医学中心）
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
In recent years, deep learning (DL) methods have become powerful tools for biomedical image segmentation. However, high annotation efforts and costs are commonly needed to acquire sufficient biomedical training data for DL models. To alleviate the burden of manual annotation, in this paper, we propose a new weakly supervised DL approach for biomedical image segmentation using boxes only annotation. First, we develop a method to combine graph search (GS) and DL to generate fine object masks from box annotation, in which DL uses box annotation to compute a rough segmentation for GS and then GS i…
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 …
University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；BIOSS Centre for Biological Signalling Studies（BIOSS生物信号研究中心）
There is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segme…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Self-supervised pre-training has become the priory choice to establish reliable neural networks for automated recognition of massive biomedical microscopy images, which are routinely annotation-free, without semantics, and without guarantee of quality. Note that this paradigm is still at its infancy and limited by closely related open issues: 1) how to learn robust representations in an unsupervised manner from unlabelled biomedical microscopy images of low diversity in samples? and 2) how to obtain the most significant representations demanded by a high-quality segmentation? Aiming at these i…
Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）；Télécom Paristech University（巴黎电信学院）；Montréal Heart Institute（蒙特利尔心脏研究所）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）
Semantic segmentation is a crucial task in biomedical image processing, which recent breakthroughs in deep learning have allowed to improve. However, deep learning methods in general are not yet widely used in practice since they require large amount of data for training complex models. This is particularly challenging for biomedical images, because data and ground truths are a scarce resource. Annotation efforts for biomedical images come with a real cost, since experts have to manually label images at pixel-level on samples usually containing many instances of the target anatomy (e.g. in his…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Invenio Imaging（Invenio 成像公司）；New York University（纽约大学）
Learning high-quality, self-supervised, visual representations is essential to advance the role of computer vision in biomedical microscopy and clinical medicine. Previous work has focused on self-supervised representation learning (SSL) methods developed for instance discrimination and applied them directly to image patches, or fields-of-view, sampled from gigapixel whole-slide images (WSIs) used for cancer diagnosis. However, this strategy is limited because it (1) assumes patches from the same patient are independent, (2) neglects the patient-slide-patch hierarchy of clinical biomedical mic…
U-Mamba: Enhancing Long-range Dependency for Biomedical Image Segmentation
Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, University Health Network（彼得·蒙克心脏中心，大学健康网络）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（向量人工智能研究所）
Copy-Move Detection in Optical Microscopy: A Segmentation Network and A Dataset
Institute of Data Science and Information Computing, National Chung Hsing University（国立中兴大学数据科学与信息计算研究所）；SOE Technology Inc.（SOE科技公司）；iGroup (Asia-Pacific) Ltd.（资讯群（亚太）有限公司）
Institute of Bioengineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院生物工程研究所）；Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG)（马克斯·普朗克分子细胞生物学与遗传学研究所）；Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD)（德累斯顿系统生物学中心）；Institut de Génomique Fonctionnelle de Lyon (IGFL), École Normale Supérieure de Lyon（里昂高等师范学院里昂功能基因组学研究所）；Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)（法国国家科学研究中心）
Accurate detection and segmentation of cell nuclei in volumetric (3D) fluorescence microscopy datasets is an important step in many biomedical research projects. Although many automated methods for these tasks exist, they often struggle for images with low signal-to-noise ratios and/or dense packing of nuclei. It was recently shown for 2D microscopy images that these issues can be alleviated by training a neural network to directly predict a suitable shape representation (star-convex polygon) for cell nuclei. In this paper, we adopt and extend this approach to 3D volumes by using star-convex p…
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）
In silico Deep Learning Protocols for Label-Free Super-Resolution Microscopy: A Comparative Study of Network Architectures and SNR Dependence
Newcastle University in Singapore（纽卡斯尔大学新加坡分校）；Newcastle University（纽卡斯尔大学）；Toronto Metropolitan University（多伦多都会大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Singapore Institute of Technology（新加坡理工学院）；Northumbria University（诺森比亚大学）
As digital medical imaging becomes more prevalent and archives increase in size, representation learning exposes an interesting opportunity for enhanced medical decision support systems. On the other hand, medical imaging data is often scarce and short on annotations. In this paper, we present an assessment of unsupervised feature learning approaches for images in the biomedical literature, which can be applied to automatic biomedical concept detection. Six unsupervised representation learning methods were built, including traditional bags of visual words, autoencoders, and generative adversar…
Multiple stains are usually used to highlight biological substances in biomedical image analysis. To decompose multiple stains for co-localization quantification, blind source separation is usually performed. Prior model-based stain separation methods usually rely on stains' spatial distributions over an image and may fail to solve the co-localization problem. With the advantage of machine learning, deep generative models are used for this purpose. Since prior knowledge of imaging models is ignored in purely data-driven solutions, these methods may be sub-optimal. In this study, a novel learni…
Research in media forensics has gained traction to combat the spread of misinformation. However, most of this research has been directed towards content generated on social media. Biomedical image forensics is a related problem, where manipulation or misuse of images reported in biomedical research documents is of serious concern. The problem has failed to gain momentum beyond an academic discussion due to an absence of benchmark datasets and standardized tasks. In this paper we present BioFors -- the first dataset for benchmarking common biomedical image manipulations. BioFors comprises 47,80…
Emory University（埃默里大学）；University of Brasília（巴西利亚大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
Highly clumped nuclei clusters captured in fluorescence in situ hybridization microscopy images are common histology entities under investigations in a wide spectrum of tissue-related biomedical investigations. Due to their large scale in presence, computer based image analysis is used to facilitate such analysis with improved analysis efficiency and reproducibility. To ensure the quality of downstream biomedical analyses, it is essential to segment clustered nuclei with high quality. However, this presents a technical challenge commonly encountered in a large number of biomedical research, as…
Cell segmentation is a fundamental task for computational biology analysis. Identifying the cell instances is often the first step in various downstream biomedical studies. However, many cell segmentation algorithms, including the recently emerging deep learning-based methods, still show limited generality under the multi-modality environment. Weakly Supervised Cell Segmentation in Multi-modality High-Resolution Microscopy Images was hosted at NeurIPS 2022 to tackle this problem. We propose MEDIAR, a holistic pipeline for cell instance segmentation under multi-modality in this challenge. MEDIA…
Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
Despite current advancement in the field of biomedical image processing, propelled by the deep learning revolution, multimodal image registration, due to its several challenges, is still often performed manually by specialists. The recent success of image-to-image (I2I) translation in computer vision applications and its growing use in biomedical areas provide a tempting possibility of transforming the multimodal registration problem into a, potentially easier, monomodal one. We conduct an empirical study of the applicability of modern I2I translation methods for the task of rigid registration…
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…
TTT-Unet: Enhancing U-Net with Test-Time Training Layers for Biomedical Image Segmentation
Lehigh University（里海大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
We leverage deep learning techniques to jointly denoise and super-resolve biomedical images acquired with fluorescence microscopy. We develop a deep learning algorithm based on the networks and method described in the recent W2S paper to solve a joint denoising and super-resolution problem. Specifically, we address the restoration of SIM images from widefield images. Our TensorFlow model is trained on the W2S dataset of cell images and is made accessible online in this repository: https://github.com/mchatton/w2s-tensorflow. On test images, the model shows a visually-convincing denoising and in…
Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；Izmir University of Economics（伊兹密尔经济大学）；Tampere University of Technology（坦佩雷理工大学）
Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) based on histopathological imaging has progressed rapidly in recent years with the rise of machine learning based methodologies. Traditional approaches consist of training a classification model using features extracted from the images, based on textures or morphological properties. Recently, deep-learning based methods have been applied directly to the raw (unprocessed) data. However, their usability is impacted by the paucity of annotated data in the biomedical sector. In order to leverage the learning capabilities of deep Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs) withi…
Institute of AI for Health, Helmholtz Munich -- German Research Centre for Environmental Health（亥姆霍兹慕尼黑中心——德国环境健康研究中心健康人工智能研究所）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；AstraZeneca（阿斯利康）
Diffusion models are a special type of generative model, capable of synthesising new data from a learnt distribution. We introduce DISPR, a diffusion-based model for solving the inverse problem of three-dimensional (3D) cell shape prediction from two-dimensional (2D) single cell microscopy images. Using the 2D microscopy image as a prior, DISPR is conditioned to predict realistic 3D shape reconstructions. To showcase the applicability of DISPR as a data augmentation tool in a feature-based single cell classification task, we extract morphological features from the red blood cells grouped into …
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati（印度理工学院古瓦哈蒂分校）；UiT The Arctic University of Norway（挪威特罗姆瑟大学（UiT 挪威北极大学））；Indian Institute of Technology Dhanbad（印度理工学院丹巴德分校）
Scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM) has been employed since microscopic images are widely used for biomedical or materials research. Acoustic imaging is an important and well-established method used in nondestructive testing (NDT), bio-medical imaging, and structural health monitoring.The imaging is frequently carried out with signals of low amplitude, which might result in leading that are noisy and lacking in details of image information. In this work, we attempted to analyze SAM images acquired from low amplitude signals and employed a block matching filter over time domain signals to obtain…
Microscopy is one of the most essential imaging techniques in life sciences. High-quality images are required in order to solve (potentially life-saving) biomedical research problems. Many microscopy techniques do not achieve sufficient resolution for these purposes, being limited by physical diffraction and hardware deficiencies. Electron microscopy addresses optical diffraction by measuring emitted or transmitted electrons instead of photons, yielding nanometer resolution. Despite pushing back the diffraction limit, blur should still be taken into account because of practical hardware imperf…
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI)（加州纳米系统研究所）；David Geffen School of Medicine（大卫·格芬医学院）
Using a deep neural network, we demonstrate a digital staining technique, which we term PhaseStain, to transform quantitative phase images (QPI) of labelfree tissue sections into images that are equivalent to brightfield microscopy images of the same samples that are histochemically stained. Through pairs of image data (QPI and the corresponding brightfield images, acquired after staining) we train a generative adversarial network (GAN) and demonstrate the effectiveness of this virtual staining approach using sections of human skin, kidney and liver tissue, matching the brightfield microscopy …
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Bordeaux（波尔多大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Unilever R&D Colworth（联合利华研发中心科尔沃斯）
The need for labour intensive pixel-wise annotation is a major limitation of many fully supervised learning methods for segmenting bioimages that can contain numerous object instances with thin separations. In this paper, we introduce a deep convolutional neural network for microscopy image segmentation. Annotation issues are circumvented by letting the network being trainable on coarse labels combined with only a very small number of images with pixel-wise annotations. We call this new labelling strategy `lazy' labels. Image segmentation is stratified into three connected tasks: rough inner r…
Institute of Imaging and Computer Vision, RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学成像与计算机视觉研究所）
Automated image processing approaches are indispensable for many biomedical experiments and help to cope with the increasing amount of microscopy image data in a fast and reproducible way. Especially state-of-the-art deep learning-based approaches most often require large amounts of annotated training data to produce accurate and generalist outputs, but they are often compromised by the general lack of those annotated data sets. In this work, we propose how conditional generative adversarial networks can be utilized to generate realistic image data for 3D fluorescence microscopy from annotatio…
Fluorescence microscopy has enabled a dramatic development in modern biology. Due to its inherently weak signal, fluorescence microscopy is not only much noisier than photography, but also presented with Poisson-Gaussian noise where Poisson noise, or shot noise, is the dominating noise source. To get clean fluorescence microscopy images, it is highly desirable to have effective denoising algorithms and datasets that are specifically designed to denoise fluorescence microscopy images. While such algorithms exist, no such datasets are available. In this paper, we fill this gap by constructing a …
Multi-instance learning is common for computer vision tasks, especially in biomedical image processing. Traditional methods for multi-instance learning focus on designing feature aggregation methods and multi-instance classifiers, where the aggregation operation is performed either in feature extraction or learning phase. As deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve great success in image processing via automatic feature learning, certain feature aggregation mechanisms need to be incorporated into common DNN architecture for multi-instance learning. Moreover, flexibility and reliability are crucial …
Volumetric (3d) images are acquired for many scientific and biomedical purposes using imaging methods such as serial section microscopy, CT scans, and MRI. A frequent step in the analysis and reconstruction of such data is the alignment and registration of images that were acquired in succession along a spatial or temporal dimension. For example, in serial section electron microscopy, individual 2d sections are imaged via electron microscopy and then must be aligned to one another in order to produce a coherent 3d volume. State of the art approaches find image correspondences derived from patc…
Louisiana State University in Shreveport（路易斯安那州立大学什里夫波特分校）；Kitware（Kitware公司）；Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆-凯特琳癌症中心）；Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）；IBM T. J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
In this article, we describe the design and implementation of a publicly accessible dermatology image analysis benchmark challenge. The goal of the challenge is to sup- port research and development of algorithms for automated diagnosis of melanoma, a lethal form of skin cancer, from dermoscopic images. The challenge was divided into sub-challenges for each task involved in image analysis, including lesion segmentation, dermoscopic feature detection within a lesion, and classification of melanoma. Training data included 900 images. A separate test dataset of 379 images was provided to measure …
University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute（上海交通大学密西根学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Fluorescence microscopy plays an important role in biomedical research. The depth-variant point spread function (PSF) of a fluorescence microscope produces low-quality images especially in the out-of-focus regions of thick specimens. Traditional deconvolution to restore the out-of-focus images is usually insufficient since a depth-invariant PSF is assumed. This article aims at handling fluorescence microscopy images by learning-based depth-variant PSF and reducing artifacts. We propose adaptive weighting depth-variant deconvolution (AWDVD) with defocus level prediction convolutional neural net…
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Cross Cancer Institute（十字癌症研究所）
Automated cell detection and localization from microscopy images are significant tasks in biomedical research and clinical practice. In this paper, we design a new cell detection and localization algorithm that combines deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and compressed sensing (CS) or sparse coding (SC) for end-to-end training. We also derive, for the first time, a backpropagation rule, which is applicable to train any algorithm that implements a sparse code recovery layer. The key observation behind our algorithm is that cell detection task is a point object detection task in computer vi…
