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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2024.10.16.617897

Domain Specific AI Segmentation of IMPDH2 Rod/Ring Structures in Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells

Ball, S. T. M.·Hennessy, M. J.·Tan, Y.·Hoettges, K. F.·Perkins, N. D.·Wilkinson, D. J.·White, M. R. H.·Zheng, Y.·Turner, D. A.
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Abstract

BackgroundInosine monophosphate dehydrogenase 2 (IMPDH2) is an enzyme that catalyses the rate limiting step of guanine nucleotides. In mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs) IMPDH2 is held as large multi-protein complexes known as rod-ring (RR) structures that dissociate when ESCs differentiate. Manual analysis of RR structures from confocal microscopy images, although possible, is not feasible on a large scale due to the quantity of RR structures present in each field of view. To address this analysis bottleneck, we have created a fully automatic RR image classification pipeline to segment, characterise and measure feature distributions of these structures in ESCs. ResultsWe find that this model can automatically segment images with a Dice score of over 80% for both rods and rings for in-domain images compared to expert annotation, with a slight drop to 70% for datasets out of domain. Important feature measurements derived from these segmentations show high agreement with the measurements derived from expert annotation, achieving an R2 score of over 90% for counting the number of rings and rods over the dataset. ConclusionsWe have established for the first time a quantitative baseline for RR distribution in pluripotent ESCs and have made a pipeline available for training to be applied to other models in which RR remain an open topic of study.

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Ball, S. T. M., Hennessy, M. J., Tan, Y., Hoettges, K. F., Perkins, N. D., Wilkinson, D. J., White, M. R. H., Zheng, Y., Turner, D. A.. 2024-10-17. Domain Specific AI Segmentation of IMPDH2 Rod/Ring Structures in Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.10.16.617897

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