Open AccessGenerative optical modeling of whole blood for detecting platelets in lens-free images
Author(s) -
Benjamin D. Haeffele,
Christian Pick,
Zaoyang Lin,
Evelien Mathieu,
Stuart C. Ray,
René Vidal
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
biomedical optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.362
H-Index - 86
ISSN - 2156-7085
DOI - 10.1364/boe.382280
Subject(s) - lens (geology) , computer science , artificial intelligence , convolutional neural network , computer vision , pixel , microscope , microscopy , image processing , optics , image sensor , pattern recognition (psychology) , image (mathematics) , physics
In this paper, we consider the task of detecting platelets in images of diluted whole blood taken with a lens-free microscope. Despite having several advantages over traditional microscopes, lens-free imaging systems have the significant challenge that the resolution of the system is typically limited by the pixel dimensions of the image sensor. As a result of this limited resolution, detecting platelets is very difficult even by manual inspection of the images due to the fact that platelets occupy just a few pixels of the reconstructed image. To address this challenge, we develop an optical model of diluted whole blood to generate physically realistic simulated holograms suitable for training machine learning models in a supervised manner. We then use this model to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) for platelet detection and validate our approach by developing a novel optical configuration which allows collecting both lens-free and fluorescent microscopy images of the same field of view of diluted whole blood samples with fluorescently labeled platelets.