A deep learning model for drug screening and evaluation in bladder cancer organoids

Three-dimensional cell tissue culture, which produces biological structures termed organoids, has rapidly promoted the progress of biological research, including basic research, drug discovery, and regenerative medicine. However, due to the lack of algorithms and software, analysis of organoid growth is labor intensive and time-consuming. Currently it requires individual measurements using software such as ImageJ, leading to low screening efficiency when used for a high throughput screen. To solve this problem, we developed a bladder cancer organoid culture system, generated microscopic images, and developed a novel automatic image segmentation model, AU2Net (Attention and Cross U2Net). Using a dataset of two hundred images from growing organoids (day1 to day 7) and organoids with or without drug treatment, our model applies deep learning technology for image segmentation. To further improve the accuracy of model prediction, a variety of methods are integrated to improve the model’s specificity, including adding Grouping Cross Merge (GCM) modules at the model’s jump joints to strengthen the model’s feature information. After feature information acquisition, a residual attentional gate (RAG) is added to suppress unnecessary feature propagation and improve the precision of organoids segmentation by establishing rich context-dependent models for local features. Experimental results show that each optimization scheme can significantly improve model performance. The sensitivity, specificity, and F1-Score of the ACU2Net model reached 94.81%, 88.50%, and 91.54% respectively, which exceed those of U-Net, Attention U-Net, and other available network models. Together, this novel ACU2Net model can provide more accurate segmentation results from organoid images and can improve the efficiency of drug screening evaluation using organoids.