Predicting multipotency of human adult stem cells derived from various donors through deep learning

Adult stem cell-based therapeutic approaches have great potential in regenerative medicine because of their immunoregulatory properties and multidifferentiation capacity. Nevertheless, the outcomes of stem cell‑based therapies to date have shown inconsistent efficacy owing to donor variation, thwarting the expectation of clinical effects. However, such donor dependency has been elucidated by biological consequences that current research could not predict. Here, we introduce cellular morphology-based prediction to determine the multipotency rate of human nasal turbinate stem cells (hNTSCs), aiming to predict the differentiation rate of keratocyte progenitors. We characterized the overall genes and morphologies of hNTSCs from five donors and compared stemness-related properties, including multipotency and specific lineages, using mRNA sequencing. It was demonstrated that transformation factors affecting the principal components were highly related to cell morphology. We then performed a convolutional neural network-based analysis, which enabled us to assess the multipotency level of each cell group based on their morphologies with 85.98% accuracy. Surprisingly, the trend in expression levels after ex vivo differentiation matched well with the deep learning prediction. These results suggest that AI‑assisted cellular behavioral prediction can be utilized to perform quantitative, non-invasive, single-cell, and multimarker characterizations of live stem cells for improved quality control in clinical cell therapies.