CIEGAN: A Deep Learning Tool for Cell Image Enhancement

Long-term live-cell imaging technology has emerged in the study of cell culture and development, and it is expected to elucidate the differentiation or reprogramming morphology of cells and the dynamic process of interaction between cells. There are some advantages to this technique: it is noninvasive, high-throughput, low-cost, and it can help researchers explore phenomena that are otherwise difficult to observe. Many challenges arise in the real-time process, for example, low-quality micrographs are often obtained due to unavoidable human factors or technical factors in the long-term experimental period. Moreover, some core dynamics in the developmental process are rare and fleeting in imaging observation and difficult to recapture again. Therefore, this study proposes a deep learning method for microscope cell image enhancement to reconstruct sharp images. We combine generative adversarial nets and various loss functions to make blurry images sharp again, which is much more convenient for researchers to carry out further analysis. This technology can not only make up the blurry images of critical moments of the development process through image enhancement but also allows long-term live-cell imaging to find a balance between imaging speed and image quality. Furthermore, the scalability of this technology makes the methods perform well in fluorescence image enhancement. Finally, the method is tested in long-term live-cell imaging of human-induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte differentiation experiments, and it can greatly improve the image space resolution ratio.