Papers › LIVECell—A large-scale dataset for label-free live cell segmentation

LIVECell—A large-scale dataset for label-free live cell segmentation

30 Aug 2021Nature Methods 2021 8archive 2025-07-28

Christoffer Edlund, Timothy R. Jackson, Nabeel Khalid, Nicola Bevan, Timothy Dale, Andreas Dengel, Sheraz Ahmed, Johan Trygg, Rickard Sjögren

Light microscopy combined with well-established protocols of two-dimensional cell culture facilitates high-throughput quantitative imaging to study biological phenomena. Accurate segmentation of individual cells in images enables exploration of complex biological questions, but can require sophisticated imaging processing pipelines in cases of low contrast and high object density. Deep learning-based methods are considered state-of-the-art for image segmentation but typically require vast amounts of annotated data, for which there is no suitable resource available in the field of label-free cellular imaging. Here, we present LIVECell, a large, high-quality, manually annotated and expert-validated dataset of phase-contrast images, consisting of over 1.6 million cells from a diverse set of cell morphologies and culture densities. To further demonstrate its use, we train convolutional neural network-based models using LIVECell and evaluate model segmentation accuracy with a proposed a suite of benchmarks.

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sartorius-research/LIVECell mentioned in paperpytorch report

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Tasks

Cell SegmentationCultural Vocal Bursts Intensity PredictionImage SegmentationInstance SegmentationSegmentationSemantic Segmentation

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

LIVECell

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Cell Segmentation LIVECell Cascade Mask RCNN-ResNest-200 LIVECell Extrapolation (A172) 1328 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Cell Segmentation LIVECell Cascade Mask RCNN-ResNest-200 LIVECell Extrapolation (A549) 1403 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Cell Segmentation LIVECell Cascade Mask RCNN-ResNest-200 LIVECell Transferability 0.98 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Cell Segmentation LIVECell Cascade Mask RCNN-ResNest-200 mask AFNR 45.3 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Cell Segmentation LIVECell Cascade Mask RCNN-ResNest-200 mask AP 47.9 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Cell Segmentation LIVECell CenterMask-VoVNet2-FPN LIVECell Extrapolation (A172) 1948 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Cell Segmentation LIVECell CenterMask-VoVNet2-FPN LIVECell Extrapolation (A549) 2031 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Cell Segmentation LIVECell CenterMask-VoVNet2-FPN LIVECell Transferability 1.21 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Cell Segmentation LIVECell CenterMask-VoVNet2-FPN mask AFNR 52.2 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Cell Segmentation LIVECell CenterMask-VoVNet2-FPN mask AP 47.8 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report

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