Unsupervised Two-Path Neural Network for Cell Event Detection and Classification Using Spatiotemporal Patterns

Automatic event detection in cell videos is essential for monitoring cell populations in biomedicine. Deep learning methods have advantages over traditional approaches for cell event detection due to their ability to capture more discriminative features of cellular processes. Supervised deep learning methods, however, are inherently limited due to the scarcity of annotated data. Unsupervised deep learning methods have shown promise in general (non-cell) videos because they can learn the visual appearance and motion of regularly occurring events. Cell videos, however, can have rapid, irregular changes in cell appearance and motion, such as during cell division and death, which are often the events of most interest. We propose a novel unsupervised two-path input neural network architecture to capture these irregular events with three key elements: 1) a visual encoding path to capture regular spatiotemporal patterns of observed objects with convolutional long short-term memory units; 2) an event detection path to extract information related to irregular events with max-pooling layers; and 3) integration of the hidden states of the two paths to provide a comprehensive representation of the video that is used to simultaneously locate and classify cell events. We evaluated our network in detecting cell division in densely packed stem cells in phase-contrast microscopy videos. Our unsupervised method achieved higher or comparable accuracy to standard and state-of-the-art supervised methods.