Microscopy cell counting with fully convolutional regression networks

This paper concerns automated cell counting in microscopy images. The approach we take is to adapt Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to regress a cell spatial density map across the image. This is applicable to situations where traditional single-cell segmentation based methods do not work well d...

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Main Authors: Xie, W, Noble, J, Zisserman, A
Format: Conference item
Published: TUM Technische Universität München 2015
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author Xie, W
Noble, J
Zisserman, A
author_facet Xie, W
Noble, J
Zisserman, A
author_sort Xie, W
collection OXFORD
description This paper concerns automated cell counting in microscopy images. The approach we take is to adapt Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to regress a cell spatial density map across the image. This is applicable to situations where traditional single-cell segmentation based methods do not work well due to cell clumping or overlap. We make the following contributions: (i) we develop and compare architectures for two Fully Convolutional Regression Networks (FCRNs) for this task; (ii) since the networks are fully convolutional, they can predict a density map for an input image of arbitrary size, and we exploit this to improve efficiency at training time by training end-to-end on image patches; and (iii) we show that FCRNs trained entirely on synthetic data are able to give excellent predictions on real microscopy images without fine-tuning, and that the performance can be further improved by fine-tuning on the real images. We set a new state-of-the-art performance for cell counting on the standard synthetic image benchmarks and, as a side benefit, show the potential of the FCRNs for providing cell detections for overlapping cells.
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spelling oxford-uuid:3ffa263f-48d7-4479-8a11-8d0edc07793c2022-03-26T14:35:18ZMicroscopy cell counting with fully convolutional regression networksConference itemhttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_5794uuid:3ffa263f-48d7-4479-8a11-8d0edc07793cSymplectic Elements at OxfordTUM Technische Universität München2015Xie, WNoble, JZisserman, AThis paper concerns automated cell counting in microscopy images. The approach we take is to adapt Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to regress a cell spatial density map across the image. This is applicable to situations where traditional single-cell segmentation based methods do not work well due to cell clumping or overlap. We make the following contributions: (i) we develop and compare architectures for two Fully Convolutional Regression Networks (FCRNs) for this task; (ii) since the networks are fully convolutional, they can predict a density map for an input image of arbitrary size, and we exploit this to improve efficiency at training time by training end-to-end on image patches; and (iii) we show that FCRNs trained entirely on synthetic data are able to give excellent predictions on real microscopy images without fine-tuning, and that the performance can be further improved by fine-tuning on the real images. We set a new state-of-the-art performance for cell counting on the standard synthetic image benchmarks and, as a side benefit, show the potential of the FCRNs for providing cell detections for overlapping cells.
spellingShingle Xie, W
Noble, J
Zisserman, A
Microscopy cell counting with fully convolutional regression networks
title Microscopy cell counting with fully convolutional regression networks
title_full Microscopy cell counting with fully convolutional regression networks
title_fullStr Microscopy cell counting with fully convolutional regression networks
title_full_unstemmed Microscopy cell counting with fully convolutional regression networks
title_short Microscopy cell counting with fully convolutional regression networks
title_sort microscopy cell counting with fully convolutional regression networks
work_keys_str_mv AT xiew microscopycellcountingwithfullyconvolutionalregressionnetworks
AT noblej microscopycellcountingwithfullyconvolutionalregressionnetworks
AT zissermana microscopycellcountingwithfullyconvolutionalregressionnetworks