Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Recent advances have enabled the study of human brain de-velopment using brain organoids derived from stem cells. Quantifying cellular processes like mitosis in these organoids offers insights into neurodevelopmental disorders, but the manual analysis is time-consuming, and existing datasets lack specific details for brain organoid studies. We introduce BOrg, a dataset designed to study mitotic events in the embryonic development of the brain using confocal microscopy images of brain organoids. BOrg utilizes an efficient annotation pipeline with sparse point annotations and techniques that minimize expert effort, overcoming limitations of standard deep learning approaches on sparse data. We adapt and benchmark state-of-the-art object detection and cell counting models on BOrg for detecting and analyzing mitotic cells across the prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase stages. Our results demonstrate that these adapted models significantly improve mitosis analysis efficiency and accuracy for brain organoid research compared to existing methods. BOrg facilitates the development of automated tools to quantify statistics like mitosis rates, aiding mecha-nistic studies of neurodevelopmental processes and disorders. Data and code are available at BOrg's GitHub page.
Authors: Muhammad Awais, Mehaboobathunnisa Sahul Hameed, Bidisha Bhattacharya, Orly Reiner, Gregory Slabaugh, Rao Muhammad Anwer
Language: English
Subfield: Biophysics
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4410296347