GeneSegNet: a deep learning framework for cell segmentation by integrating gene expression and imaging.

Journal: Genome biology
Published Date:

Abstract

When analyzing data from in situ RNA detection technologies, cell segmentation is an essential step in identifying cell boundaries, assigning RNA reads to cells, and studying the gene expression and morphological features of cells. We developed a deep-learning-based method, GeneSegNet, that integrates both gene expression and imaging information to perform cell segmentation. GeneSegNet also employs a recursive training strategy to deal with noisy training labels. We show that GeneSegNet significantly improves cell segmentation performances over existing methods that either ignore gene expression information or underutilize imaging information.

Authors

  • Yuxing Wang
  • Wenguan Wang
  • Dongfang Liu
    Department of Pathology, Immunology and Laboratory Medicine, Rutgers University- New Jersey Medical School, 185 South Orange Avenue, Newark, NJ, 07103, USA; Center for Immunity and Inflammation, New Jersey Medical School, Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey, Newark, NJ, 07103, USA. Electronic address: dongfang.liu@rutgers.edu.
  • Wenpin Hou
    Department of Mathematics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
  • Tianfei Zhou
  • Zhicheng Ji
    Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, USA. zhicheng.ji@duke.edu.