Tubule segmentation of fluorescence microscopy images based on convolutional neural networks with inhomogeneity correction
This work addresses the problem of automated quantitative analysis for biologists studying complex biological structures, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing CNN-based segmentation approaches.
The paper tackles the challenge of segmenting tubular structures in fluorescence microscopy images by proposing a convolutional neural network method with data augmentation and inhomogeneity correction, achieving better performance in correctly segmenting and identifying multiple structures compared to other methods.
Fluorescence microscopy has become a widely used tool for studying various biological structures of in vivo tissue or cells. However, quantitative analysis of these biological structures remains a challenge due to their complexity which is exacerbated by distortions caused by lens aberrations and light scattering. Moreover, manual quantification of such image volumes is an intractable and error-prone process, making the need for automated image analysis methods crucial. This paper describes a segmentation method for tubular structures in fluorescence microscopy images using convolutional neural networks with data augmentation and inhomogeneity correction. The segmentation results of the proposed method are visually and numerically compared with other microscopy segmentation methods. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method has better performance with correctly segmenting and identifying multiple tubular structures compared to other methods.