DermoGAN: multi-task cycle generative adversarial networks for unsupervised automatic cell identification on reflectance confocal microscopy images of the human epidermis.

Significance: Accurate identification of epidermal cells on reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) images is important in the study of epidermal architecture and topology of both healthy and diseased skin. However, analysis of these images is currently done manually and therefore time-consuming and subject to human error and inter-expert interpretation. It is also hindered by low image quality due to noise and heterogeneity.

Aim: We aimed to design an automated pipeline for the analysis of the epidermal structure from RCM images.

Approach: Two attempts have been made at automatically localizing epidermal cells, called keratinocytes, on RCM images: the first is based on a rotationally symmetric error function mask, and the second on cell morphological features. Here, we propose a dual-task network to automatically identify keratinocytes on RCM images. Each task consists of a cycle generative adversarial network. The first task aims to translate real RCM images into binary images, thus learning the noise and texture model of RCM images, whereas the second task maps Gabor-filtered RCM images into binary images, learning the epidermal structure visible on RCM images. The combination of the two tasks allows one task to constrict the solution space of the other, thus improving overall results. We refine our cell identification by applying the pre-trained StarDist algorithm to detect star-convex shapes, thus closing any incomplete membranes and separating neighboring cells.

Results: The results are evaluated both on simulated data and manually annotated real RCM data. Accuracy is measured using recall and precision metrics, which is summarized as the -score.

Conclusions: We demonstrate that the proposed fully unsupervised method successfully identifies keratinocytes on RCM images of the epidermis, with an accuracy on par with experts' cell identification, is not constrained by limited available annotated data, and can be extended to images acquired using various imaging techniques without retraining.