Deep learning Framework for Mobile Microscopy
This work addresses challenges in mobile microscopy to enhance disease diagnostics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like DeblurGAN and FuseGAN.
The authors tackled the problem of automating high-throughput mobile microscopy for disease diagnostics by developing a comprehensive pipeline that includes in-focus/out-of-focus classification, deblurring, and focus-stacking, resulting in improved image quality compared to existing mobile analytics solutions.
Mobile microscopy is a promising technology to assist and to accelerate disease diagnostics, with its widespread adoption being hindered by the mediocre quality of acquired images. Although some paired image translation and super-resolution approaches for mobile microscopy have emerged, a set of essential challenges, necessary for automating it in a high-throughput setting, still await to be addressed. The issues like in-focus/out-of-focus classification, fast scanning deblurring, focus-stacking, etc. -- all have specific peculiarities when the data are recorded using a mobile device. In this work, we aspire to create a comprehensive pipeline by connecting a set of methods purposely tuned to mobile microscopy: (1) a CNN model for stable in-focus / out-of-focus classification, (2) modified DeblurGAN architecture for image deblurring, (3) FuseGAN model for combining in-focus parts from multiple images to boost the detail. We discuss the limitations of the existing solutions developed for professional clinical microscopes, propose corresponding improvements, and compare to the other state-of-the-art mobile analytics solutions.