Lisette Lockhart
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Papers from this author
Human Embryo Cell Centroid Localization and Counting in Time-Lapse Sequences
Lisette Lockhart, Parvaneh Saeedi, Jason Au, Jon Havelock
Auto-TLDR; Automated Time-Lapse Estimation of Embryo Cell Stage in Time-lapse Sequences
Abstract Slides Poster Similar
Couples suffering from infertility issues often use In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) treatment to give birth. Continuous embryo monitoring with time-lapse imaging enables time-based development metrics alongside visual features to assess an embryo’s quality before transfer. Tracking embryonic cell development provides valuable information about its likelihood of leading to a positive pregnancy. Automating this task is challenging due to cell overlap, occlusion, and variation. In this paper, cell stage is identified by counting detected cell centroids in early embryo time-lapse sequences. A convolutional regression network is trained on Gaussian-annotated centroid maps to localize cell centroids. Added network attention blocks encode spatio-temporal relationship in time-lapse sequences to emphasize relevant features in the current frame based on previous frame and cell (i.e. blastomere) movement. The proposed approach was applied to 108 embryo sequences including 1- to 4-cell stage, achieving cell centroid localization distance error of 3.98 pixels, cell detection rate 80.9%, and cell counting accuracy of 80.2%.