arXiv:2604.26517cs.CVq-bio.CB2026-04中稿 · presentation at th…

直接从噪声荧光图像中回归微管弯曲度,无需分割

MTCurv: Deep learning for direct microtubule curvature mapping in noisy fluorescence microscopy images

  • 用深度网络直接回归弯曲度图,跳过分割步骤
  • 在含背景荧光的图像中仍能准确恢复局部弯曲度
  • 适合需要精确几何分析的生物成像研究者

准确量化弯曲生物结构的几何特征对理解细胞力学和疾病相关形态变化至关重要。微管弯曲度是描述纤维刚性和机械扰动的关键参数。然而,由于噪声、低对比度和部分可见性,从荧光显微图像中可靠提取弯曲度仍具挑战。现有方法依赖带预处理或后处理的分割流程,对分割误差敏感,在不良成像条件下常失效。本文提出MTCurv,一种基于合成数据(像素级弯曲标注)的深度学习框架,将弯曲度估计重构为无分割的回归任务,采用注意力增强的残差U-Net结构。为减少幻觉并保证空间一致性,引入结合均方误差与梯度一致性项的梯度感知损失。此外,评估了常用回归与图像质量指标,发现多数感知和盲测指标不适用于弯曲度估计,而基于相关性的指标(特别是斯皮尔曼相关系数)更可靠。在两个难度递增的数据集上实验表明,MTCurv能在背景荧光存在下准确恢复局部微管弯曲度。消融实验证明残差编码和注意力解码均有贡献。本工作提供了一套实用的纤维弯曲分析工具,并为生物医学成像中的几何感知回归提供方法论启示。数据与代码已公开。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Accurate quantification of the geometry of curvilinear biological structures is essential for understanding cellular mechanics and disease-related morphological alterations. Microtubule curvature is a key descriptor of filament rigidity and mechanical perturbations. However, reliable curvature extraction from fluorescence microscopy images remains challenging due to noise, low contrast, and partial filament visibility. Existing approaches rely on segmentation pipelines with pre or post-processing, which are highly sensitive to segmentation errors and often fail under adverse imaging conditions. In this work, we propose MTCurv, a deep learning framework for direct, segmenta-tion-free regression of microtubule curvature maps from noisy microscopy images. Leveraging a synthetic dataset with pixel-wise curvature annotations, we reformulated curvature estimation as a regression problem and adapted an attention-based residual U-Net. To reduce hallucinations and enforce spatial coherence, we introduced a gradient-aware loss combining Mean Squared Error with a gradient consistency term. Beyond model and loss design, we evaluated commonly used regression and image quality metrics, revealing that many perceptual and blind metrics are poorly suited for curvature estimation. Correlation-based metrics, particularly Spearman correlation, emerged as more reliable indicators of curvature prediction quality. Experiments on two datasets of increasing difficulty demonstrated that MTCurv accurately recovers local microtubule curvatures, even in the presence of background fluorescence. Ablation studies highlighted the contribution of both residual encoding and attention-based decoding. Overall, this work provides a practical tool for filament curvature analysis and methodological insights for geometry-aware regression in biomedical imaging. Datasets and code are made available.

微管分析深度学习图像回归生物成像

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