WormSwin: Instance segmentation of C. elegans using vision transformer

The possibility to extract motion of a single organism from video recordings at a large-scale provides means for the quantitative study of its behavior, both individual and collective. This task is particularly difficult for organisms that interact with one another, overlap, and occlude parts of their bodies in the recording. Here we propose WormSwin - an approach to extract single animal postures of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) from recordings of many organisms in a single microscope well. Based on transformer neural network architecture our method segments individual worms across a range of videos and images generated in different labs. Our solutions offers accuracy of 0.990 average precision (AP0.50) and comparable results on the benchmark image dataset BBBC010. Finally, it allows to segment challenging overlapping postures of mating worms with an accuracy sufficient to track the organisms with a simple tracking heuristic. An accurate and efficient method for C. elegans segmentation opens up new opportunities for studying of its behaviors previously inaccessible due to the difficulty in the worm extraction from the video frames.