Augmenting C. elegans Microscopic Dataset for Accelerated Pattern Recognition

The detection of cell shape changes in 3D time-lapse images of complex tissues is an important task. However, it is a challenging and tedious task to establish a comprehensive dataset to improve the performance of deep learning models. In the paper, we present a deep learning approach to augment 3D live images of the Caenorhabditis elegans embryo, so that we can further speed up the specific structural pattern recognition. We use an unsupervised training over unlabeled images to generate supplementary datasets for further pattern recognition. Technically, we used Alex-style neural networks in a generative adversarial network framework to generate new datasets that have common features of the C. elegans membrane structure. We also made the dataset available for a broad scientific community.