In Genomics, proteomics & bioinformatics
The high-content image-based assay is commonly leveraged for identifying the phenotypic impact of genetic perturbations in biology field. However, a persistent issue remains unsolved during experiments: the interferential technical noise caused by systematic errors (e.g., temperature, reagent concentration, and well location) is always mixed up with the real biological signals, leading to misinterpretation of any conclusion drawn. Here, we showed a mean teacher based deep learning model (DeepNoise) that can disentangle biological signals from the experimental noise. Specifically, we aimed to classify the phenotypic impact of 1108 different genetic perturbations screened from 125,510 fluorescent microscopy images, which were totally unrecognizable by human eye. We validated our model by participating in the Recursion Cellular Image Classification Challenge, and our proposed method achieved an extremely high classification score (accuracy: 99.596%), ranking the 2nd place among 866 participating groups. This promising result indicates the successful separation of biological and technical factors, which might help decrease the cost of treatment development and expedite the drug discovery process. Our source code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/Scu-sen/Recursion-Cellular-Image-Classification-Challenge.
Yang Sen, Shen Tao, Fang Yuqi, Wang Xiyue, Zhang Jun, Yang Wei, Huang Junzhou, Han Xiao
2023-Jan-03
Biological signal, Classification, Deep learning, Fluorescent microscopy image, Genetic perturbations
