• Idris, I. M.
• Toha, S. F.
• Idris, A. S.
• Malik, H.
• Daud, M. F.
• Tokhi, Mohammad Osman

Abstract

Cell culture monitoring necessitates thorough attention for the continuous characterization of cultivated cells. Machine learning has recently emerged to engage in a process, such as a microscopy segmentation task; however, the trained data may not be comprehensive for other datasets. Most algorithms do not encompass a wide range of data attributes and require distinct system workflows. Thus, the main objective of the research is to propose a segmentation pipeline specifically for fibroblast cell images on phase contrast microscopy at different magnifications and to achieve reliable predictions during deployment. The research employs patch-based segmentation for predictions, with U-Net as the baseline architecture. The proposed segmentation pipeline demonstrated significant performance for the UNet-based network, achieving an IoU score above 0.7 for multiple magnifications, and provided predictions for cell confluency value with less than 3% error. The study also found that the proposed model could segment the fibroblast cells in under 10 seconds with the help of OpenVINO and Intel Compute Stick 2 on Raspberry Pi, with its optimal precision limited to approximately 80% cell confluency which is sufficient for real-world deployment as the cell culture is typically ready for passaging at the threshold.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• phase
• laser emission spectroscopy
• machine learning
• microscopy