Deep localization of subcellular protein structures from fluorescence microscopy images

Accurate localization of proteins from fluorescence microscopy images is challenging due to the inter-class similarities and intra-class disparities introducing grave concerns in addressing multi-class classification problems. Conventional machine learning-based image prediction pipelines rely heavily on pre-processing such as normalization and segmentation followed by handcrafted feature extraction to identify useful, informative, and application-specific features. Here, we demonstrate that deep learning-based pipelines can effectively classify protein images from different datasets. We propose an end-to-end Protein Localization Convolutional Neural Network (PLCNN) that classifies protein images more accurately and reliably. PLCNN processes raw imagery without involving any pre-processing steps and produces outputs without any customization or parameter adjustment for a particular dataset. Experimental analysis is performed on five benchmark datasets. PLCNN consistently outperformed the existing state-of-the-art approaches from traditional machine learning and deep architectures. This study highlights the importance of deep learning for the analysis of fluorescence microscopy protein imagery. The proposed deep pipeline can better guide drug designing procedures in the pharmaceutical industry and open new avenues for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics.