ExoDeepFinder

This is a fork of DeepFinder customized for use in TIRF microscopy, designed for detecting exocytosis events.

Contents

• [System requirements](##System requirements)
• [Installation guide](##Installation guide)
• [Instructions for use](##Instructions for use)
• Documentation
• Google group

System requirements

Deep Finder has been implemented using Python 3 and is based on the Tensorflow package. It has been tested on Linux (Debian 10), and should also work on Mac OSX as well as Windows.

Package dependencies

Deep Finder depends on following packages. The package versions for which our software has been tested are displayed in brackets:

tensorflow   (2.11.1)
lxml         (4.9.3)
mrcfile      (1.4.3)
scikit-learn (1.3.2)
scikit-image (0.22.0)
matplotlib   (3.8.1)
PyQt5        (5.13.2)
pyqtgraph    (0.13.3 )
openpyxl     (3.1.2)
pycm         (4.0)

Installation guide

Before installation, you need a python environment on your machine. If this is not the case, we advise installing Miniconda.

(Optional) Before installation, we recommend first creating a virtual environment that will contain your DeepFinder installation:

conda create --name dfinder python=3.9
conda activate dfinder

Now, you can install DeepFinder with pip:

pip install -e /path/to/tirfm-deepfinder

Also, in order for Tensorflow to work with your Nvidia GPU, you need to install CUDA. An alternative could be to install the python packages cudatoolkit and cudnn. Once these steps have been achieved, the user should be able to run DeepFinder.

Instructions for use

Instructions for using Deep Finder are contained in folder examples/. The scripts contain comments on how the tool should be used.

Annotation

The first step is to annotate the exocytose events in the movies with the napari-deepfinder plugin. Follow the install instructions, and open napari. In the menu, choose Plugins > Napari DeepFinder > Annotation to open the annotation tools. Open a training image. Create a new points layer, and name it exo_1 (or any name ending with _1, since we want to annotate with the class 1). You can use the Orthoslice view to easily navigate in the volume, by using the Plugins > Napari DeepFinder > Orthoslice view menu. Scroll in the image until you find and exocytose event. Click the "Add point" or "Add points" button, then click on the exocytose event to annotate it. Save your annotations to xml by choosing the File > Save selected layer(s)... menu, or by using ctrl+S (command+S on a mac), and choose the Napadi DeepFinder (*.xml) format, name the output file with the _objl.xml suffix (see the training section for the file naming convention).

Training

To run the training, you should have a folder containing your data organised in the following way:

data/
├── train
│   ├── movie1.h5
│   ├── movie1_objl.xml
│   ├── movie1_target.h5
│   ├── movie2.h5
│   ├── movie2_objl.xml
│   ├── movie2_target.h5
...
└── valid
    ├── movie3.h5
    ├── movie3_objl.xml
    ├── movie3_target.h5
...

The targets must contain 2 classes:

• the exocytose events, delineated by experts (class 2),
• the other bright spots, which are not exocytose events, and are detected by the Atlas spot detector (class 1).

Once the experts have annotated the training and validation images by creating the objl.xml files describing the exocytose events, the corresponding segmentations must be generated with the step1_generate_target.py script (cd examples/training/, then python step1_generate_target.py). This will create a segmentation from all events, each with the predefined exocytose shape.

Then, the other non-exocytose events must be detected with Atlas. The installation instructions are detailed in the repository.

Once Atlas is installed, you can generate the bright spots segmentations and convert them to the h5 format with the following commands:

• python compute_segmentations.py -a build/atlas -d path/to/dataset/ -o path/to/output/segmentations/
• python convert_tiff_to_h5.py -s path/to/output/segmentations/ -o path/to/output/segmentations_h5/

Use python compute_segmentations.py --help and python convert_tiff_to_h5.py --help for more information about those tools.

Then, the experts segmentations must be merged with the Atlas detections with the step2_merge_atlas_targets.py script.

Finally, the training can be launched with step3_launch_training.py.

Prediction

Predictions can be generated with the step1_launch_segment.py script.

This will generate binary segmentations ; the step2_launch_clustering.py script can convert them to distinct spots, so that each event gets a unique label.

Finally, the results can be evaluated with the step3_launch_evaluation.py (which will make use of the evaluate.py tool).

Using the GUI

The napari-deepfinder plugin can be used to perform perictions. Open the image you want to segment in napari. In the menu, choose Plugins > Napari DeepFinder > Segment to open the segmentation tools. Choose the image layer you want to segment. Select the examples/analyze/in/net_weights_FINAL.h5 net weights ; or the path of the model weights you want to use for the segmentation. Use 3 for the number of class, and 160 for the patch size. Choose an output image name (with the .h5 extension), then launch the segmentation.