用深度学习自动分析胚胎发育中的细胞质丝,提升试管婴儿胚胎筛选效率。
Cytoplasmic Strings Analysis in Human Embryo Time-Lapse Videos using Deep Learning Framework
- 构建人机协作标注流程,建立首个含13,568帧的细胞质丝数据集。
- 提出新型不确定性感知损失函数,显著提升细长低对比度结构检测的F1分数。
- 适用于辅助生殖领域研究者与临床胚胎学家,助力智能化胚胎评估。
不孕不育是全球重大健康问题,尽管体外受精技术改善了治疗效果,但胚胎筛选仍是关键瓶颈。时间-延时成像可实现胚胎发育的连续无创监测,但现有自动化方法多依赖传统形态动力学特征,忽视新兴生物标志物。细胞质丝(Cytoplasmic Strings, CS)是扩张囊胚中连接内细胞团与滋养层的细丝状结构,与更快的囊胚形成、更高囊胚等级及更强发育潜能相关。然而,当前CS评估依赖人工视觉检查,存在劳动强度大、主观性强、检测难度高等问题。本文首次提出面向人类体外受精胚胎的细胞质丝计算分析框架。我们设计人机协同标注流程,从时间-延时成像视频中构建生物学验证的CS数据集,共包含13,568帧,其中仅少量为阳性实例。基于此数据集,提出两阶段深度学习框架:(i)帧级分类判断是否存在细胞质丝;(ii)在阳性样本中定位其具体区域。针对严重类别不平衡与特征不确定性问题,引入新颖的不确定性感知对比嵌入(NUCE)损失,结合置信度加权与嵌入收缩项,形成紧凑且分离良好的类别簇。NUCE在五个Transformer骨干网络上均显著提升F1分数,基于RF-DETR的定位模块在检测细长、低对比度的细胞质丝方面达到当前最优性能。代码将公开于 https://github.com/HamadYA/CS_Detection。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Infertility is a major global health issue, and while in-vitro fertilization has improved treatment outcomes, embryo selection remains a critical bottleneck. Time-lapse imaging enables continuous, non-invasive monitoring of embryo development, yet most automated assessment methods rely solely on conventional morphokinetic features and overlook emerging biomarkers. Cytoplasmic Strings, thin filamentous structures connecting the inner cell mass and trophectoderm in expanded blastocysts, have been associated with faster blastocyst formation, higher blastocyst grades, and improved viability. However, CS assessment currently depends on manual visual inspection, which is labor-intensive, subjective, and severely affected by detection and subtle visual appearance. In this work, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first computational framework for CS analysis in human IVF embryos. We first design a human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline to curate a biologically validated CS dataset from TLI videos, comprising 13,568 frames with highly sparse CS-positive instances. Building on this dataset, we propose a two-stage deep learning framework that (i) classifies CS presence at the frame level and (ii) localizes CS regions in positive cases. To address severe imbalance and feature uncertainty, we introduce the Novel Uncertainty-aware Contractive Embedding (NUCE) loss, which couples confidence-aware reweighting with an embedding contraction term to form compact, well-separated class clusters. NUCE consistently improves F1-score across five transformer backbones, while RF-DETR-based localization achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection performance for thin, low-contrast CS structures. The source code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/HamadYA/CS_Detection.
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