Title
Segmentation with Residual Attention U-Net and an Edge-Enhancement Approach Preserves Cell Shape Features.
Abstract
The ability to extrapolate gene expression dynamics in living single cells requires robust cell segmentation, and one of the challenges is the amorphous or irregularly shaped cell boundaries. To address this issue, we modified the U-Net architecture to segment cells in fluorescence widefield microscopy images and quantitatively evaluated its performance. We also proposed a novel loss function approach that emphasizes the segmentation accuracy on cell boundaries and encourages shape feature preservation. With a 97% sensitivity, 93% specificity, 91% Jaccard similarity, and 95% Dice coefficient, our proposed method called Residual Attention U-Net with edge-enhancement surpassed the state-of-the-art U-Net in segmentation performance as evaluated by the traditional metrics. More remarkably, the same proposed candidate also performed the best in terms of the preservation of valuable shape features, namely area, eccentricity, major axis length, solidity and orientation. These improvements on shape feature preservation can serve as useful assets for downstream cell tracking and quantification of changes in cell statistics or features over time.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/EMBC48229.2022.9871026
Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Conference
2022
2694-0604
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nanyan Zhu100.34
Chen Liu22911.46
Britney Forsyth300.34
Zakary S Singer400.34
Andrew F. Laine574783.01
Tal Danino600.34
Jia Guo703.04