Neural network control of focal position during time-lapse microscopy of cells

Live-cell microscopy is quickly becoming an indispensable technique for studying the dynamics of cellular processes. Maintaining the specimen in focus during image acquisition is crucial for high-throughput applications, especially for long experiments or when a large sample is being continuously sc...

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Veröffentlicht in:Scientific reports Jg. 8; H. 1; S. 7313 - 10
Hauptverfasser: Wei, Ling, Roberts, Elijah
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: London Nature Publishing Group UK 09.05.2018
Nature Publishing Group
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ISSN:2045-2322, 2045-2322
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Zusammenfassung:Live-cell microscopy is quickly becoming an indispensable technique for studying the dynamics of cellular processes. Maintaining the specimen in focus during image acquisition is crucial for high-throughput applications, especially for long experiments or when a large sample is being continuously scanned. Automated focus control methods are often expensive, imperfect, or ill-adapted to a specific application and are a bottleneck for widespread adoption of high-throughput, live-cell imaging. Here, we demonstrate a neural network approach for automatically maintaining focus during bright-field microscopy. Z-stacks of yeast cells growing in a microfluidic device were collected and used to train a convolutional neural network to classify images according to their z-position. We studied the effect on prediction accuracy of the various hyperparameters of the neural network, including downsampling, batch size, and z-bin resolution. The network was able to predict the z-position of an image with ±1  μ m accuracy, outperforming human annotators. Finally, we used our neural network to control microscope focus in real-time during a 24 hour growth experiment. The method robustly maintained the correct focal position compensating for 40  μ m of focal drift and was insensitive to changes in the field of view. About ~100 annotated z-stacks were required to train the network making our method quite practical for custom autofocus applications.
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ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-25458-w