SimMolCC: A Similarity of Automatically Detected Bio-Molecule Clusters between Fluorescent Cells

Abstract

In the field of studies on the “Neural Synapses” in the nervous system, its experts manually (or pseudo-automatically) detect the bio-molecule clusters (e.g., of proteins) in many TIRF (Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence) images of a fluorescent cell and analyze their static/dynamic behaviors. This paper proposes a novel method for the automatic detection of the bio-molecule clusters in a TIRF image of a fluorescent cell and conducts several experiments on its performance, e.g., mAP @ IoU (mean Average Precision @ Intersection over Union) and F1-score @ IoU, as an objective/quantitative means of evaluation. As a result, the best of the proposed methods achieved 0.695 as its mAP @ IoU = 0.5 and 0.250 as its F1-score @ IoU = 0.5 and would have to be improved, especially with respect to its recall @ IoU. But, the proposed method could automatically detect bio-molecule clusters that are not only circular and not always uniform in size, and it can output various histograms and heatmaps for novel deeper analyses of the automatically detected bio-molecule clusters, while the particles detected by the Mosaic Particle Tracker 2D/3D, which is one of the most conventional methods for experts, can be only circular and uniform in size. In addition, this paper defines and validates a novel similarity of automatically detected bio-molecule clusters between fluorescent cells, i.e., SimMolCC, and also shows some examples of SimMolCC-based applications.