Training deep learning models for cell image segmentation with sparse annotations

Abstract

Deep learning is becoming more prominent in cell image analysis. However, collecting the annotated data required to train efficient deep-learning models remains a major obstacle. I demonstrate that functional performance can be achieved even with sparsely annotated data. Furthermore, I show that the selection of sparse cell annotations significantly impacts performance. I modified Cellpose and StarDist to enable training with sparsely annotated data and evaluated them in conjunction with ELE-PHANT, a cell tracking algorithm that internally uses U-Net based cell segmentation. These results illustrate that sparse annotation is a generally effective strategy in deep learning-based cell image segmentation. Finally, I demonstrate that with the help of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), it is feasible to build an effective deep learning model of cell image segmentation from scratch just in a few minutes.