Cellpose3: one-click image restoration for improved cellular segmentation

Segmentation
Machine learning
Tools

Software for image restoration that works across many cell types and imaging modalities.

Author

Carsen Stringer, Marius Pachitariu

Published

Feb 2025

Generalist methods for cellular segmentation have good out-of-the-box performance on a variety of image types; however, existing methods struggle for images that are degraded by noise, blurring or undersampling, all of which are common in microscopy. We focused the development of Cellpose3 on addressing these cases and here we demonstrate substantial out-of-the-box gains in segmentation and image quality for noisy, blurry and undersampled images. Unlike previous approaches that train models to restore pixel values, we trained Cellpose3 to output images that are well segmented by a generalist segmentation model, while maintaining perceptual similarity to the target images. Furthermore, we trained the restoration models on a large, varied collection of datasets, thus ensuring good generalization to user images. We provide these tools as ‘one-click’ buttons inside the graphical interface of Cellpose as well as in the Cellpose API.

paper | talk+tutorial | slides | code | news coverage | preprint

This is an upgrade to Cellpose; if you’re unfamiliar with Cellpose, check it out here.

Denoising, deblurring and upsampling examples:

cellpose denoising examples

cellpose deblurring examples

cellpose upsampling examples

Cellpose3 slides:

Janelia
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