False Positive Reduction of Cilia Detected in Low Resolution TEM Images Using a Convolutional Neural Network

Automated detection of cilia in low magnification transmission electron microscopy images is a central task in the quest to relieve the pathologists in the manual, time consuming and subjective diagnostic procedure. However, automation of the process, specifically in low magnification, is challenging due to the similar characteristics of noncilia candidates, as well as high contextual variance among the individual cilia candidates. In this paper, a convolutional neural network classifier is proposed to further reduce the false positives detected by a previously presented template matching method. Adding the proposed convolutional neural network increases the area under Precision-Recall curve from 0.42 to 0.71, and significantly reduces the false positive objects.