Automatic segmentation and cardiac mechanics analysis of evolving zebrafish using deep-learning

Abstract

ObjectiveIn the study of early cardiac development, it is important to acquire accurate volume changes of the heart chambers. Although advanced imaging techniques, such as light-sheet fluorescent microscopy (LSFM), provide an accurate procedure for analyzing the structure of the heart, rapid and robust segmentation is required to reduce laborious time and accurately quantify developmental cardiac mechanics. MethodsThe traditional biomedical analysis involving segmentation of the intracardiac volume is usually carried out manually, presenting bottlenecks due to enormous data volume at high axial resolution. Our advanced deep-learning techniques provide a robust method to segment the volume within a few minutes. Our U-net based segmentation adopted manually segmented intracardiac volume changes as training data and produced the other LSFM zebrafish cardiac motion images automatically. ResultsThree cardiac cycles from 2 days post fertilization (dpf) to 5 dpf were successfully segmented by our U-net based network providing volume changes over time. In addition to understanding the cardiac function for each of the two chambers, the ventricle and atrium were separated by 3D erode morphology methods. Therefore, cardiac mechanical properties were measured rapidly and demonstrated incremental volume changes of both chambers separately. Interestingly, stroke volume (SV) remains similar in the atrium while that of the ventricle increases SV gradually. ConclusionOur U-net based segmentation provides a delicate method to segment the intricate inner volume of zebrafish heart during development; thus providing an accurate, robust and efficient algorithm to accelerate cardiac research by bypassing the labor-intensive task as well as improving the consistency in the results.