Fluorescent Neuronal Cells v2: multi-task, multi-format annotations for deep learning in microscopy

Abstract

Fluorescent Neuronal Cells v2 is a collection of fluorescence microscopy images and the corresponding ground-truth annotations, designed to foster innovative research in the domains of Life Sciences and Deep Learning. This dataset encompasses three image collections wherein rodent neuronal cell nuclei and cytoplasm are stained with diverse markers to highlight their anatomical or functional characteristics. Specifically, we release 1874 high-resolution images alongside 750 corresponding ground-truth annotations for several learning tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection and counting. The contribution is two-fold. First, thanks to the variety of annotations and their accessible formats, we anticipate our work will facilitate methodological advancements in computer vision approaches for segmentation, detection, feature extraction, unsupervised and self-supervised learning, transfer learning, and related areas. Second, by enabling extensive exploration and benchmarking, we hope Fluorescent Neuronal Cells v2 will catalyze breakthroughs in fluorescence microscopy analysis and promote cutting-edge discoveries in life sciences.