Evaluation of Deep Learning Topcoders Method for Neuron Individualization in Histological Macaque Brain Section
This work addresses the challenge of automating neuron segmentation in neurological data, which is incremental as it adapts existing deep learning techniques to a new domain with reduced annotation effort.
The researchers tackled the problem of labor-intensive neuron individualization in histological brain sections by developing a pipeline that synthesizes pixel-level labels from point annotations and testing an ensemble deep learning algorithm. Their method achieved an average detection accuracy of 0.93 for segmenting neuronal cells at both object and pixel levels.
Cell individualization has a vital role in digital pathology image analysis. Deep Learning is considered as an efficient tool for instance segmentation tasks, including cell individualization. However, the precision of the Deep Learning model relies on massive unbiased dataset and manual pixel-level annotations, which is labor intensive. Moreover, most applications of Deep Learning have been developed for processing oncological data. To overcome these challenges, i) we established a pipeline to synthesize pixel-level labels with only point annotations provided; ii) we tested an ensemble Deep Learning algorithm to perform cell individualization on neurological data. Results suggest that the proposed method successfully segments neuronal cells in both object-level and pixel-level, with an average detection accuracy of 0.93.