Holotomography-driven learning for in-silico staining of single cells in flow cytometry avoiding co-registration
Pirone, D.; Giugliano, G.; Schiavo, M.; Montella, A.; Mugnano, M.; Cerbone, V.; Raia, M.; Scalia, G.; Kurelac, I.; Medina, D. L.; Miccio, L.; Capasso, M.; Iolascon, A.; Memmolo, P.; Ferraro, P.
Show abstract
Virtual staining is the current state-of-the-art computational technique to cleverly enhance intracellular specificity in unstained biological samples by using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on co-registered pairs of unstained/stained images. While effective, this approach suffers from unpredictable biases inherent to fluorescence microscopy and encounters challenges when applied to flow cytometry data as it would require accurate co-registration on a huge number of images. Here, we present a novel method that exploits for the first time a Holotomography-driven learning to completely eliminate the need for co-registration. We demonstrate that training a CNN on a stain-free dataset of 3D refractive index tomograms of flowing cells elegantly unlocks stain-free intracellular specificity in quantitative phase imaging flow cytometry. This breakthrough, by circumventing the critical co-registration bottleneck, opens unprecedented perspectives for label-free, high-throughput imaging flow cytometry, offering a powerful new paradigm for advanced 2D and 3D single-cell analysis.
Matching journals
The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.