# Cell segmentation from telecentric bright-field transmitted light microscopy images using a Residual Attention U-Net: a case study on HeLa line

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.12290 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12290/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04467/) (2016)
- [ParseNet: Looking Wider to See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04579/) (2015)
- [RA-UNet: A hybrid deep attention-aware network to extract liver and tumor in CT scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01328/) (2018)
- [Spectroscopic Approach to Correction and Visualisation of Bright-Field Light Transmission Microscopy Biological Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06519/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [IDCIA: Immunocytochemistry Dataset for Cellular Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08992/) (2024)
- [High-Throughput Low-Cost Segmentation of Brightfield Microscopy Live Cell Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14106/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Living cell segmentation from bright-field light microscopy images is challenging due to the image complexity and temporal changes in the living cells. Recently developed deep learning (DL)-based methods became popular in medical and microscopy image segmentation tasks due to their success and promising outcomes. The main objective of this paper is to develop a deep learning, U-Net-based method to segment the living cells of the HeLa line in bright-field transmitted light microscopy. To find the most suitable architecture for our datasets, a residual attention U-Net was proposed and compared with an attention and a simple U-Net architecture. The attention mechanism highlights the remarkable features and suppresses activations in the irrelevant image regions. The residual mechanism overcomes with vanishing gradient problem. The Mean-IoU score for our datasets reaches 0.9505, 0.9524, and 0.9530 for the simple, attention, and residual attention U-Net, respectively. The most accurate semantic segmentation results was achieved in the Mean-IoU and Dice metrics by applying the residual and attention mechanisms together. The watershed method applied to this best -- Residual Attention -- semantic segmentation result gave the segmentation with the specific information for each cell.