Quantitative analysis of the dexamethasone side effect on human-derived young and aged skeletal muscle by myotube and nuclei segmentation using deep learning

Skeletal muscle cells (skMCs) combine together to create long, multi-nucleated structures called myotubes. By studying the size, length, and number of nuclei in these myotubes, we can gain a deeper understanding of skeletal muscle development. However, human experimenters may often derive unreliable results owing to the unusual shape of the myotube, which causes significant measurement variability. We propose a new method for quantitative analysis of the dexamethasone side effect on human-derived young and aged skeletal muscle by simultaneous myotube and nuclei segmentation using deep learning combined with post-processing techniques. The deep learning model outputs myotube semantic segmentation, nuclei semantic segmentation, and nuclei center, and post-processing applies a watershed algorithm to accurately distinguish overlapped nuclei and identify myotube branches through skeletonization. To evaluate the performance of the model, the myotube diameter and the number of nuclei were calculated from the generated segmented images and compared with the results calculated by human experimenters. In particular, the proposed model produced outstanding outcomes when comparing human-derived primary young and aged skMCs treated with dexamethasone. The proposed standardized and consistent automated image segmentation system for myotubes is expected to help streamline the drug-development process for skeletal muscle diseases. The code and the data are available at https://github.com/tdn02007/QA-skMCs-Seg.