Residual Network with Attention to Neural Cells Segmentation

Abstract

      Many neuroscience applications, including understanding the evolution of the brain, rely on neural cell instance segmentation, which seeks to integrate the identification and segmentation of neuronal cells in microscopic imagery. However, the task is complicated by cell adhesion, deformation, vague cell outlines, low-contrast cell protrusion structures, and background imperfections. On the other hand, existing segmentation approaches frequently produce inaccurate findings. As a result, an effective strategy for using the residual network with attention to segment cells is suggested in this paper. The segmentation mask of neural cells may be accurately predicted. This method is built on U-net, with EfficientNet serving as the encoder's backbone. The attention approach is employed in the detection and segmentation modules to guide the model's attention to the most valuable features. A massive collection of neural cell microscopic images tests the proposed method. According to the findings of the experiments, this technology can accurately detect and segment neuronal cell occurrences with an intersection over the union IoU of 95.47 and a Dice-Coeff of 98.34, which is superior to current state-of-the-art approaches.