Paper ID: 2206.04558

BFS-Net: Weakly Supervised Cell Instance Segmentation from Bright-Field Microscopy Z-Stacks

Shervin Dehghani, Benjamin Busam, Nassir Navab, Ali Nasseri

Despite its broad availability, volumetric information acquisition from Bright-Field Microscopy (BFM) is inherently difficult due to the projective nature of the acquisition process. We investigate the prediction of 3D cell instances from a set of BFM Z-Stack images. We propose a novel two-stage weakly supervised method for volumetric instance segmentation of cells which only requires approximate cell centroids annotation. Created pseudo-labels are thereby refined with a novel refinement loss with Z-stack guidance. The evaluations show that our approach can generalize not only to BFM Z-Stack data, but to other 3D cell imaging modalities. A comparison of our pipeline against fully supervised methods indicates that the significant gain in reduced data collection and labelling results in minor performance difference.

Submitted: Jun 9, 2022