Counting Cells in Time-Lapse Microscopy using Deep Neural Networks

An automatic approach to counting any kind of cells could alleviate work of the experts and boost the research in fields such as regenerative medicine. In this paper, a method for microscopy cell counting using multiple frames (hence temporal information) is proposed. Unlike previous approaches where the cell counting is done independently in each frame (static cell counting), in this work the cell counting prediction is done using multiple frames (dynamic cell counting). A spatiotemporal model using ConvNets and long short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks is proposed to overcome temporal variations. The model outperforms static cell counting in a publicly available dataset of stem cells. The advantages, working conditions and limitations of the ConvNet-LSTM method are discussed. Although our method is tested in cell counting, it can be extrapolated to quantify in video (or correlated image series) any kind of objects or volumes.