Enhancing high-content imaging for studying microtubule networks at large-scale
This work addresses a domain-specific challenge for researchers studying microtubule networks in cancer therapeutics, offering an incremental improvement in imaging analysis.
The authors tackled the problem of fluorescence noise obscuring microtubule structures in high-throughput imaging by proposing a computational framework using CycleGAN to enhance image quality, achieving 0.93+ AUC-ROC for microtubule identification and enabling quantification of drug-induced density changes.
Given the crucial role of microtubules for cell survival, many researchers have found success using microtubule-targeting agents in the search for effective cancer therapeutics. Understanding microtubule responses to targeted interventions requires that the microtubule network within cells can be consistently observed across a large sample of images. However, fluorescence noise sources captured simultaneously with biological signals while using wide-field microscopes can obfuscate fine microtubule structures. Such requirements are particularly challenging for high-throughput imaging, where researchers must make decisions related to the trade-off between imaging quality and speed. Here, we propose a computational framework to enhance the quality of high-throughput imaging data to achieve fast speed and high quality simultaneously. Using CycleGAN, we learn an image model from low-throughput, high-resolution images to enhance features, such as microtubule networks in high-throughput low-resolution images. We show that CycleGAN is effective in identifying microtubules with 0.93+ AUC-ROC and that these results are robust to different kinds of image noise. We further apply CycleGAN to quantify the changes in microtubule density as a result of the application of drug compounds, and show that the quantified responses correspond well with known drug effects