Unsupervised Segmentation of Muscle Precursor Cell Images In Situ

In vitro culture of muscle stem cells on a large scale could bring light to the treatment of muscle-related diseases. However, the current work related to muscle stem cell culture is still only performed in specialized biological laboratories that are very much limited by manual experience. There are still some difficulties to achieve an automated culture of complex morphological cells in terms of live cell observation and morphological analysis. In this paper, a set of bright-field cell in situ imaging devices is designed to perform non-contact and invasive imaging of muscle precursor cells in vitro, and a neural network structured lightweight unsupervised semantic segmentation algorithm is proposed for the acquired images to achieve online extraction of cell regions of interest without manual annotation and pre-training. The algorithm first uses a graph-based super-pixel segmentation to obtain a coarse segmentation, then aggregates the coarse segmentation results with the help of Laplace operators as a reference to a four-layer convolutional neural network (CNN). The CNN parameters learn to refine the boundaries of the cells which helps the final segmentation accuracy and mean intersection–merge ratio reach 88% and 77%, respectively.