Deep Learning based Segmentation Pipeline for Label-Free Phase-Contrast Microscopy Images

The segmentation of cells is necessary for biologists in the morphological statistics for quantitative and qualitative analysis in Phase-contrast Microscopy (PCM) images. In this paper, we address the cell segmentation problem in PCM images. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) commonly is initialized with weights from a network pre-trained on a large annotated data set like ImageNet have superior performance than those trained from scratch on a small dataset. Here, we demonstrate how encoder-decoder type architectures such as U-Net and Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) can be improved by an alternative encoder which pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset. In particular, our experimental results confirm that the image descriptors from ResNet-18 are highly effective in accurate prediction of the cell boundary and have higher Intersection over Union (IoU) in comparison to the classical U-Net and require fewer training epochs.