CellSium - Versatile Cell Simulator for Microcolony Ground Truth Generation

SummaryTo train deep learning based segmentation models, large ground truth data sets are needed. To address this need in microfluidic live-cell imaging, we present CellSium, a flexibly configurable cell simulator built to synthesize realistic image sequences of bacterial microcolonies growing in monolayers. We illustrate that the simulated images are suitable for training neural networks. Synthetic time-lapse videos with and without fluorescence, using programmable cell growth models, and simulation-ready 3D colony geometries for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are also supported. Availability and ImplementationCellSium is free and open source software under the BSD license, implemented in Python, available at https://github.com/modsim/cellsium (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6193033), along with documentation, usage examples and Docker images. Contactk.noeh@fz-juelich.de Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available online.