Pyramidal Deep Neural Networks for the Accurate Segmentation and Counting of Cells in Microscopy Data

Cell segmentation and counting represent one of the most important tasks required in order to provide an exhaustive understanding of biological images. Conventional features suffer the lack of spatial consistency by causing the joining of the cells and, thus, complicating the cell counting task. We propose, in this work, a cascade of networks that take as inputs different versions of the original image. After constructing a Gaussian pyramid representation of the microscopy data, the inputs of different size and spatial resolution are given to a cascade of deep convolutional autoencoders whose task is to reconstruct the segmentation mask. The coarse masks obtained from the different networks are summed up in order to provide the final mask. The principal and main contribution of this work is to propose a novel method for the cell counting. Unlike the majority of the methods that use the obtained segmentation mask as the prior information for counting, we propose to utilize the hidden latent representations, often called the high-level features, as the inputs of a neural network based regressor. While the segmentation part of our method performs as good as the conventional deep learning methods, the proposed cell counting approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.