Cell counting in fluorescence microscopy is an essential task in biomedical research for analyzing cellular dynamics and studying disease progression. Traditional methods for cell counting involve manual counting or threshold-based segmentation, which are time-consuming and prone to human error. Recently, deep learning-based object detection methods have shown promising results in automating cell counting tasks. However, the existing methods mainly focus on segmentation-based techniques that require a large amount of labeled data and extensive computational resources. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to detect and count multiple-size cells in a fluorescence image slide using You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) with a feature pyramid network (FPN). Our proposed method can efficiently detect multiple cells with different sizes in a single image, eliminating the need for pixel-level segmentation. We show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation-based approaches in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. The experimental results on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves an average precision of 0.8 and a processing time of 43.9 ms per image. Our approach addresses the research gap in the literature by providing a more efficient and accurate method for cell counting in fluorescence microscopy that requires less computational resources and labeled data.
* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.