Method and system for detection and classification of cells using convolutional neural networks

Abstract

An artificial neural network system implemented on a computer for cell segmentation and classification of biological images. It includes a deep convolutional neural network as a feature extraction network, a first branch network connected to the feature extraction network to perform cell segmentation, and a second branch network connected to the feature extraction network to perform cell classification using the cell segmentation map generated by the first branch network. The feature extraction network is a modified VGG network where each convolutional layer uses multiple kernels of different sizes. The second branch network takes feature maps from two levels of the feature extraction network, and has multiple fully connected layers to independently process multiple cropped patches of the feature maps, the cropped patches being located at a centered and multiple shifted positions relative to the cell being classified; a voting method is used to determine the final cell classification.