LIVECell

Light microscopy is a cheap, accessible, non-invasive modality that when combined with well-established protocols of two-dimensional cell culture facilitates high-throughput quantitative imaging to study biological phenomena. Accurate segmentation of individual cells enables exploration of complex biological questions, but this requires sophisticated imaging processing pipelines due to the low contrast and high object density.

Deep learning-based methods are considered state-of-the-art for most computer vision problems but require vast amounts of annotated data, for which there is no suitable resource available in the field of label-free cellular imaging.

To address this gap we present LIVECell, a high-quality, manually annotated and expert-validated dataset that is the largest of its kind to date, consisting of over 1.6 million cells from a diverse set of cell morphologies and culture densities. To further demonstrate its utility, we provide convolutional neural network-based models trained and evaluated on LIVECell.