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Recent advances in computer vision have led to significant progress in the generation of realistic image data, with denoising diffusion probabilistic models proving to be a particularly effective method. In this study, we demonstrate that diffusion models can effectively generate fully-annotated microscopy image data sets through an unsupervised and intuitive approach, using rough sketches of desired structures as the starting point. The proposed pipeline helps to reduce the reliance on manual annotations when training deep learning-based segmentation approaches and enables the segmentation of diverse datasets without the need for human annotations. We demonstrate that segmentation models trained with a small set of synthetic image data reach accuracy levels comparable to those of generalist models trained with a large and diverse collection of manually annotated image data, thereby offering a streamlined and specialized application of segmentation models.

Mitosis is the process by which eukaryotic cells divide to produce two similar daughter cells with identical genetic material. Research into the process of mitosis is therefore of critical importance both for the basic understanding of cell biology and for the clinical approach to manifold pathologies resulting from its malfunctioning, including cancer. In this paper, we propose an approach to study mitotic progression automatically using deep learning. We used neural networks to predict different mitosis stages. We extracted video sequences of cells undergoing division and trained a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to extract image features. The use of RNN enabled better extraction of features. The RNN-based approach gave better performance compared to classifier based feature extraction methods which do not use time information. Evaluation of precision, recall, and F-score indicates the superiority of the proposed model compared to the baseline. To study the loss in performance due to confusion between adjacent classes, we plotted the confusion matrix as well. In addition, we visualized the feature space to understand why RNNs are better at classifying the mitosis stages than other classifier models, which indicated the formation of strong clusters for the different classes, clearly confirming the advantage of the proposed RNN-based approach.