Deep Learning for an Automated Image-Based Stem Cell Classification

Hematopoiesis is a process in which hematopoietic stem cells produce other mature blood cells in the bone marrow through cell proliferation and differentiation. The hematopoietic cells are cultured on a petri dish to form a different colony-forming unit (CFU). The idea is to identify the type of CFU produced by the stem cell. Several software has been developed to classify the CFU automatically. However, an automated identification or classification of CFU types has become the main challenge. Most of the current software has common drawbacks, such as the expensive operating cost and complex machines. The purpose of this study is to investigate several selected convolutional neural network (CNN) pre-trained models to overcome these constraints for automated CFU classification. Prior to CFU classification, the images are acquired from mouse stem cells and categorized into three types which are CFUerythroid (E), CFU-granulocyte/macrophage (GM) and CFU-PreB. These images are then pre-processed before being fed into CNN pre-trained models. The models adopt a deep learning neural network approach to extract informative features from the CFU images Classification performance shows that the models integrated with the preprocessing module can classify the CFUs with high accuracies and shorter computational time with 96.33% on 61 minutes and 37 seconds, respectively. Hence, this work finding could be used as the baseline reference for further research.