Deep Learning approaches for Head and Operculum Segmentation in Zebrafish Microscopy Images

In this paper, we propose variants of deep learning methods to segment head and operculum of the zebrafish larvae in microscopic images. In the first approach, we used a three-class model to jointly segment head and operculum area of zebrafish larvae from background. In the second, two-step, approach, we first trained binary segmentation model to segment head area from the background followed by another binary model to segment the operculum area within cropped head area thereby minimizing the class imbalance problem. Both of our approaches use a modified, simpler, U-Net architecture, and we also evaluate different loss functions to tackle the class imbalance problem. We systematically compare all these variants using various performance metrics. Data and open-source code are available at https://uliege.cytomine.org.