Training a deep learning model for single-cell segmentation without manual annotation

Advances in the artificial neural network have made machine learning techniques increasingly more important in image analysis tasks. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been applied to the problem of cell segmentation from microscopy images. However, previous methods used a supervised training paradigm in order to create an accurate segmentation model. This strategy requires a large amount of manually labeled cellular images, in which accurate segmentations at pixel level were produced by human operators. Generating training data is expensive and a major hindrance in the wider adoption of machine learning based methods for cell segmentation. Here we present an alternative strategy that trains CNNs without any human-labeled data. We show that our method is able to produce accurate segmentation models, and is applicable to both fluorescence and bright-field images, and requires little to no prior knowledge of the signal characteristics.