Towards deep learning-powered IVF: A large public benchmark for morphokinetic parameter prediction

An important limitation to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solutions for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is the absence of a public reference benchmark to train and evaluate deep learning (DL) models. In this work, we describe a fully annotated dataset of 756 videos of developing embryos, for a total of 337k images. We applied ResNet, LSTM, and ResNet-3D architectures to our dataset and demonstrate that they overperform algorithmic approaches to automatically annotate stage development phases. Altogether, we propose the first public benchmark that will allow the community to evaluate morphokinetic models. This is the first step towards deep learning-powered IVF. Of note, we propose highly detailed annotations with 16 different development phases, including early cell division phases, but also late cell divisions, phases after morulation, and very early phases, which have never been used before. We postulate that this original approach will help improve the overall performance of deep learning approaches on time-lapse videos of embryo development, ultimately benefiting infertile patients with improved clinical success rates (Code and data are available at https://gitlab.univ-nantes.fr/E144069X/bench_mk_pred.git).

A registration error estimation framework for correlative imaging

Correlative imaging workflows are now widely used in bioimaging and aims to image the same sample using at least two different and complementary imaging modalities. Part of the workflow relies on finding the transformation linking a source image to a target image. We are specifically interested in the estimation of registration error in point-based registration. We propose an application of multivariate linear regression to solve the registration problem allowing us to propose a framework for the estimation of the associated error in the case of rigid and affine transformations and with anisotropic noise. These developments can be used as a decision-support tool for the biologist to analyze multimodal correlative images and are available under Ec-CLEM, an open-source plugin under ICY.

Cross-modal registration using point clouds and graph-matching in the context of correlative microscopies

Correlative microscopy aims at combining two or more modalities to gain more information than the one provided by one modality on the same biological structure. Registration is needed at different steps of correlative microscopies workflows. Biologists want to select the image content used for registration not to introduce bias in the correlation of unknown structures. Intensity-based methods might not allow this selection and might be too slow when the images are very large. We propose an approach based on point clouds created from selected content by the biologist. These point clouds may be prone to big differences in densities but also missing parts and outliers. In this paper we present a method of registration for point clouds based on graph building and graph matching, and compare the method to iterative closest point based methods.