Deep convolutional neural networks for annotating gene expression patterns in the mouse brain

By Tao Zeng, Rongjian Li, Ravi Mukkamala, Jieping Ye, Shuiwang Ji. 2015

63 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Profiling gene expression in brain structures at various spatial and temporal scales is essential to understanding how genes regulate the development of brain structures. The Allen Developing Mouse Brain Atlas provides high-resolution 3-D in situ hybridization (ISH) gene expression patterns in multiple developing stages of the mouse brain. Currently, the ISH images are annotated with anatomical terms manually. In this paper, we propose a computational approach to annotate gene expression pattern images in the mouse brain at various structural levels over the course of development. We applied deep convolutional neural network that was trained on a large set of natural images to extract features from the ISH images of developing mouse brain. As a baseline representation, we applied invariant image feature descriptors to capture local statistics from ISH images and used the bag-of-words approach to build image-level representations. Both types of features from multiple ISH image sections of the entire brain were then combined to build 3-D, brain-wide gene expression representations. We employed regularized learning methods for discriminating gene expression patterns in different brain structures. Results show that our approach of using convolutional model as feature extractors achieved superior performance in annotating gene expression patterns at multiple levels of brain structures throughout four developing ages. Overall, we achieved average AUC of 0.894 ± 0.014, as compared with 0.820 ± 0.046 yielded by the bag-of-words approach. Deep convolutional neural network model trained on natural image sets and applied to gene expression pattern annotation tasks yielded superior performance, demonstrating its transfer learning property is applicable to such biological image sets.

Subfields: Biophysics, Molecular Biology

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Citations in the corpus

Opportunities and obstacles for deep learning in biology and medicine (2017, background): “In image analysis, previous examples of deep transfer learning applications proved large-scale natural image sets [42] to be useful for pre-training models that serve as generic feature extractors for various types of biological images [14,206,414,415].”
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DeepInsight: A methodology to transform a non-image data to an image for convolution neural network architecture (2019, methodology): “19 applied CNN to extract features from in situ hybridization gene expression patterns.”
Deep learning in drug discovery: an integrative review and future challenges (2022, background): “4 Drug‐induced pathway similarity A medication pair that triggers similar pathways or overlaps shows that the drugs’ mechanisms of action are similar, which is useful information for drug similarities and repositioning research (Zeng et al. 2015).”