Pixel-level multimodal fusion deep networks for predicting subcellular organelle localization from label-free live-cell imaging

Complex intracellular organizations are commonly represented by dividing the metabolic process of cells into different organelles. Therefore, identifying sub-cellular organelle architecture is significant for understanding intracellular structural properties, specific functions, and biological processes in cells. However, the discrimination of these structures in the natural organizational environment and their functional consequences are not clear. In this article, we propose a new pixel-level multimodal fusion (PLMF) deep network which can be used to predict the location of cellular organelle using label-free cell optical microscopy images followed by deep-learning-based automated image denoising. It provides valuable insights that can be of tremendous help in improving the specificity of label-free cell optical microscopy by using the Transformer–Unet network to predict the ground truth imaging which corresponds to different sub-cellular organelle architectures. The new prediction method proposed in this article combines the advantages of a transformer’s global prediction and CNN’s local detail analytic ability of background features for label-free cell optical microscopy images, so as to improve the prediction accuracy. Our experimental results showed that the PLMF network can achieve over 0.91 Pearson’s correlation coefficient (PCC) correlation between estimated and true fractions on lung cancer cell-imaging datasets. In addition, we applied the PLMF network method on the cell images for label-free prediction of several different subcellular components simultaneously, rather than using several fluorescent labels. These results open up a new way for the time-resolved study of subcellular components in different cells, especially for cancer cells.