A Saturation Artifacts Inpainting Method Based on Two-Stage GAN for Fluorescence Microscope Images

Abstract

Fluorescence microscopic images of cells contain a large number of morphological features that are used as an unbiased source of quantitative information about cell status, through which researchers can extract quantitative information about cells and study the biological phenomena of cells through statistical and analytical analysis. As an important research object of phenotypic analysis, images have a great influence on the research results. Saturation artifacts present in the image result in a loss of grayscale information that does not reveal the true value of fluorescence intensity. From the perspective of data post-processing, we propose a two-stage cell image recovery model based on a generative adversarial network to solve the problem of phenotypic feature loss caused by saturation artifacts. The model is capable of restoring large areas of missing phenotypic features. In the experiment, we adopt the strategy of progressive restoration to improve the robustness of the training effect and add the contextual attention structure to enhance the stability of the restoration effect. We hope to use deep learning methods to mitigate the effects of saturation artifacts to reveal how chemical, genetic, and environmental factors affect cell state, providing an effective tool for studying the field of biological variability and improving image quality in analysis.