The timing of cell divisions in early embryos during the In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) process is a key predictor of embryo viability. However, observing cell divisions in Time-Lapse Monitoring (TLM) is a time-consuming process and highly depends on experts. In this paper, we propose EmbryosFormer, a computational model to automatically detect and classify cell divisions from original time-lapse images. Our proposed network is designed as an encoder-decoder deformable transformer with collaborative heads. The transformer contracting path predicts per-image labels and is optimized by a classification head. The transformer expanding path models the temporal coherency between embryo images to ensure monotonic non-decreasing constraint and is optimized by a segmentation head. Both contracting and expanding paths are synergetically learned by a collaboration head. We have benchmarked our proposed EmbryosFormer on two datasets: a public dataset with mouse embryos with 8-cell stage and an in-house dataset with human embryos with 4-cell stage. Source code: https://github.com/UARK-AICV/Embryos.
@article{arxiv.2210.04615,
title = {EmbryosFormer: Deformable Transformer and Collaborative Encoding-Decoding for Embryos Stage Development Classification},
author = {Tien-Phat Nguyen and Trong-Thang Pham and Tri Nguyen and Hieu Le and Dung Nguyen and Hau Lam and Phong Nguyen and Jennifer Fowler and Minh-Triet Tran and Ngan Le},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.04615},
year = {2022}
}