Cell-cycle phenotyping with conditional random fields: A case study in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

High-resolution, multimodal microscopy grants an intimate view of the inner workings of cells. Complex processes like cell division can be monitored with microscope images, assuming identification of cells and their cell-cycle markers: cellular structures indicative of cell-cycle progress. Here, we explore how spatial relationships between these markers can facilitate their identification. We grew and synchronized Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell cultures and then acquired multimodal image data as the cells proceeded through the cell cycle. We trained a conditional random field model to capture pixel-level spatial relationships among three different cell-cycle markers observable in our images. We observed good predictive performance of this pixel-level model on three held-out test images, and performance improved when we used marker-level information from our training data to prune model predictions. Our results support the use of conditional random fields in bioimage labeling and encourage the use of as much multiscale information as available in training data when identifying cell-cycle markers.