Direct Inference of Cell Positions using Lens-Free Microscopy and Deep Learning

With in-line holography, it is possible to record biological cells over time in a three-dimensional hydrogel without the need for staining, providing the capability of observing cell behavior in a minimally invasive manner. However, this setup currently requires computationally intensive image-reconstruction algorithms to determine the required cell statistics. In this work, we directly extract cell positions from the holographic data by using deep neural networks and thus avoid several reconstruction steps. We show that our method is capable of substantially decreasing the time needed to extract information from the raw data without loss in quality.