Paper Info
Title
A cell-level quality control workflow for high-throughput image analysis.
Abstract
Image-based high throughput (HT) screening provides a rich source of information on dynamic cellular response to external perturbations. The large quantity of data generated necessitates computer-aided quality control (QC) methodologies to flag imaging and staining artifacts. Existing image- or patch-level QC methods require separate thresholds to be simultaneously tuned for each image quality metric used, and also struggle to distinguish between artifacts and valid cellular phenotypes. As a result, extensive time and effort must be spent on per-assay QC feature thresholding, and valid images and phenotypes may be discarded while image- and cell-level artifacts go undetected. We present a novel cell-level QC workflow built on machine learning approaches for classifying artifacts from HT image data. First, a phenotype sampler based on unlabeled clustering collects a comprehensive subset of cellular phenotypes, requiring only the inspection of a handful of images per phenotype for validity. A set of one-class support vector machines are then trained on each biologically valid image phenotype, and used to classify individual objects in each image as valid cells or artifacts. We apply this workflow to two real-world large-scale HT image datasets and observe that the ratio of artifact to total object area (ARcell) provides a single robust assessment of image quality regardless of the underlying causes of quality issues. Gating on this single intuitive metric, partially contaminated images can be salvaged and highly contaminated images can be excluded before image-level phenotype summary, enabling a more reliable characterization of cellular response dynamics. Our cell-level QC workflow enables identification of artificial cells created not only by staining or imaging artifacts but also by the limitations of image segmentation algorithms. The single readout ARcell that summaries the ratio of artifacts contained in each image can be used to reliably rank images by quality and more accurately determine QC cutoff thresholds. Machine learning-based cellular phenotype clustering and sampling reduces the amount of manual work required for training example collection. Our QC workflow automatically handles assay-specific phenotypic variations and generalizes to different HT image assays.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1186/s12859-020-03603-5
BMC Bioinformatics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Cell-level quality control, High throughput image analysis, Image quality measurement, Machine learning, CellProfiler
Journal
21
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1471-2105
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Minhua Qiu100.34
Bin Zhou200.34
Frederick Lo300.34
Steven Cook400.34
Jason Chyba500.34
Doug Quackenbush600.34
Jason Matzen700.34
Zhizhong Li8355.65
Puiying Annie Mak900.34
Kai-Sheng Chen10308.16
Yingyao Zhou119817.55