Semantic segmentation of human oocyte images using deep neural networks

BACKGROUND: Infertility is a significant problem of humanity. In vitro fertilisation is one of the most effective and frequently applied ART methods. The effectiveness IVF depends on the assessment and selection of gametes and embryo with the highest developmental potential. The subjective nature of morphological assessment of oocytes and embryos is still one of the main reasons for seeking effective and objective methods for assessing quality in automatic manner. The most promising methods to automatic classification of oocytes and embryos are based on image analysis aided by machine learning techniques. The special attention is paid on deep neural networks that can be used as classifiers solving the problem of automatic assessment of the oocytes/embryos. METHODS: This paper deals with semantic segmentation of human oocyte images using deep neural networks in order to develop new version of the predefined neural networks. Deep semantic oocyte segmentation networks can be seen as medically oriented predefined networks understanding the content of the image. The research presented in the paper is focused on the performance comparison of different types of convolutional neural networks for semantic oocyte segmentation. In the case study, the merits and limitations of the selected deep neural networks are analysed. RESULTS: 71 deep neural models were analysed. The best score was obtained for one of the variants of DeepLab-v3-ResNet-18 model, when the training accuracy (Acc) reached about 85% for training patterns and 79% for validation ones. The weighted intersection over union (wIoU) and global accuracy (gAcc) for test patterns were calculated, as well. The obtained values of these quality measures were 0,897 and 0.93, respectively. CONCLUSION: The obtained results prove that the proposed approach can be applied to create deep neural models for semantic oocyte segmentation with the high accuracy guaranteeing their usage as the predefined networks in other tasks.