People, Penguins and Petri Dishes: Adapting Object Counting Models To New Visual Domains And Object Types Without Forgetting

In this paper we propose a technique to adapt a convolutional neural network (CNN) based object counter to additional visual domains and object types while still preserving the original counting function. Domain-specific normalisation and scaling operators are trained to allow the model to adjust to the statistical distributions of the various visual domains. The developed adaptation technique is used to produce a singular patch-based counting regressor capable of counting various object types including people, vehicles, cell nuclei and wildlife. As part of this study a challenging new cell counting dataset in the context of tissue culture and patient diagnosis is constructed. This new collection, referred to as the Dublin Cell Counting (DCC) dataset, is the first of its kind to be made available to the wider computer vision community. State-of-the-art object counting performance is achieved in both the Shanghaitech (parts A and B) and Penguins datasets while competitive performance is observed on the TRANCOS and Modified Bone Marrow (MBM) datasets, all using a shared counting model.Comment: 10 page

Automating assessment of human embryo images and time-lapse sequences for IVF treatment

As the number of couples using In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) treatment to give birth increases, so too does the need for robust tools to assist embryologists in selecting the highest quality embryos for implantation. Quality scores assigned to embryonic structures are critical markers for predicting implantation potential of human blastocyst-stage embryos. Timing at which embryos reach certain cell and development stages in vitro also provides valuable information about their development progress and potential to become a positive pregnancy. The current workflow of grading blastocysts by visual assessment is susceptible to subjectivity between embryologists. Visually verifying when embryo cell stage increases is tedious and confirming onset of later development stages is also prone to subjective assessment. This thesis proposes methods to automate embryo image and time-lapse sequence assessment to provide objective evaluation of blastocyst structure quality, cell counting, and timing of development stages

Automating cell counting in fluorescent microscopy through deep learning with c-ResUnet

open9noThe collection of original images was supported by funding from the University of Bologna (RFO 2018) and the European Space Agency (Research agreement collaboration 4000123556).Counting cells in fluorescent microscopy is a tedious, time-consuming task that researchers have to accomplish to assess the effects of different experimental conditions on biological structures of interest. Although such objects are generally easy to identify, the process of manually annotating cells is sometimes subject to fatigue errors and suffers from arbitrariness due to the operator’s interpretation of the borderline cases. We propose a Deep Learning approach that exploits a fully-convolutional network in a binary segmentation fashion to localize the objects of interest. Counts are then retrieved as the number of detected items. Specifically, we introduce a Unet-like architecture, cell ResUnet (c-ResUnet), and compare its performance against 3 similar architectures. In addition, we evaluate through ablation studies the impact of two design choices, (i) artifacts oversampling and (ii) weight maps that penalize the errors on cells boundaries increasingly with overcrowding. In summary, the c-ResUnet outperforms the competitors with respect to both detection and counting metrics (respectively, F1 score = 0.81 and MAE = 3.09). Also, the introduction of weight maps contribute to enhance performances, especially in presence of clumping cells, artifacts and confounding biological structures. Posterior qualitative assessment by domain experts corroborates previous results, suggesting human-level performance inasmuch even erroneous predictions seem to fall within the limits of operator interpretation. Finally, we release the pre-trained model and the annotated dataset to foster research in this and related fields.openMorelli R.; Clissa L.; Amici R.; Cerri M.; Hitrec T.; Luppi M.; Rinaldi L.; Squarcio F.; Zoccoli A.Morelli R.; Clissa L.; Amici R.; Cerri M.; Hitrec T.; Luppi M.; Rinaldi L.; Squarcio F.; Zoccoli A

Cell-Net: Embryonic Cell Counting and Centroid Localization via Residual Incremental Atrous Pyramid and Progressive Upsampling Convolution

In-vitro fertilization (IVF), as the most common fertility treatment, has never reached its maximum potentials. Systematic selection of embryos with the highest implementation potentials is a necessary step towards enhancing the effectiveness of IVF. Embryonic cell numbers and their developmental rate are believed to correlate with the embryo\u27s implantation potentials. In this paper, we propose an automatic framework based on a deep convolutional neural network to take on the challenging task of automatic counting and centroid localization of embryonic cells (blastomeres) in microscopic human embryo images. In particular, the cell counting task is reformulated as an end-to-end regression problem that is based on a shape-aware Gaussian dot annotation to map the input image into an output density map. The proposed Cell-Net system incorporates two novel components, residual incremental Atrous pyramid and progressive up-sampling convolution. Residual incremental Atrous pyramid enables the network to extract rich global contextual information without raising the ‘grinding’ issue. Progressive up-sampling convolution gradually reconstructs a high-resolution feature map by taking into account short- and longrange dependencies. Experimental results confirm that the proposed framework is capable of predicting the cell-stage and detecting blastomeres in embryo images of