Modeling Temporal Information of Mitotic for Mitotic Event Detection

Abstract

Due to the enormous potential and influence that stem cells may have in regenerative medicine, there has been a rapidly growing interest in developing tools to analyze and characterize the behaviors of these cells in vitro. Among these behaviors, mitosis, or cell division, is very important because stem cells proliferate and renew themselves through mitosis. However, current automated systems for mitosis detection often require traditional computer vision technology and machine learning methods; automated mitosis detection and recognition are difficult to achieve and mainly rely on manual annotation. In this paper, we proposed an effective method to capture video-wide temporal information for automated mitosis detection and recognition, which is a nondestructive imaging modality, thereby allowing continuous monitoring of cells in culture. In this approach, we postulate that a function capable of ordering the frames of a video temporally well captures the evolution of the appearance within the video. We learn such ranking functions per video via a ranking machine and use the parameters of these functions as a new video representation. Here, we utilized the CNN model (VGG-16) and some classic low-level feature extraction methods (HOG, SIFT, and GIST) to extract low-level features for each frame. The proposed method is easy to interpret and implement, fast to compute and effective in recognizing mitosis events. In a comparison experiment, our approach significantly outperformed previous approaches in terms of both detection accuracy and computational efficiency. The data that we validate the proposed method with includes C3H10 mesenchymal and C2C12 myoblastic stem cell populations. Our approach achieves an F-score of 95.8 percent on the C2C12 dataset and an F-score of 95.3 percent on the C3H10 dataset. The results on both datasets outperform traditional mitosis recognition methods based on probability models. These experiments all demonstrate the significance of our approach.