Virtually Objective Quantification of in vitro Wound Healing Scratch Assays with the Segment Anything Model
<|reference_start|>Virtually Objective Quantification of in vitro Wound Healing Scratch Assays with the Segment Anything Model: The in vitro scratch assay is a widely used assay in cell biology to assess the rate of wound closure related to a variety of therapeutic interventions. While manual measurement is subjective and vulnerable to intra- and interobserver variability, computer-based tools are theoretically objective, but in practice often contain parameters which are manually adjusted (individually per image or data set) and thereby provide a source for subjectivity. Modern deep learning approaches typically require large annotated training data which complicates instant applicability. In this paper, we make use of the segment anything model, a deep foundation model based on interactive point-prompts, which enables class-agnostic segmentation without tuning the network's parameters based on domain specific training data. The proposed method clearly outperformed a semi-objective baseline method that required manual inspection and, if necessary, adjustment of parameters per image. Even though the point prompts of the proposed approach are theoretically also a source for subjectivity, results attested very low intra- and interobserver variability, even compared to manual segmentation of domain experts.<|reference_end|>
@article{löwenstein2024virtually,
    title={Virtually Objective Quantification of in vitro Wound Healing Scratch
  Assays with the Segment Anything Model},
    author={Katja L"owenstein, Johanna Rehrl, Anja Schuster, Michael Gadermayr},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.02187},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2407.02187},
    primaryClass={cs.CV}
}