A deep learning approach for the detection and counting of colon cancer cells (HT-29 cells) bunches and impurities.

HT-29 has an epithelial appearance as a human colorectal cancer cell line. Early detection of colorectal cancer can enhance survival rates. This study aims to detect and count HT-29 cells using a deep-learning approach (ResNet-50). The cell lines were procured from Procell Life Science & Technology Co., Ltd. (Wuhan, China). Further, the dataset is self-prepared in lab experiments, cell culture, and collected 566 images. These images contain two classes; the HT-29 human colorectal adenocarcinoma cells (blue shapes in bunches) and impurities (tinny circular grey shapes). These images are annotated with the help of an image labeller as impurity and cancer cells. Then afterwards, the images are trained, validated, and tested against the deep learning approach ResNet50. Finally, in each image, the number of impurity and cancer cells are counted to find the accuracy of the proposed model. Accuracy and computational expense are used to gauge the network's performance. Each model is tested ten times with a non-overlapping train and random test splits. The effect of data pre-processing is also examined and shown in several tasks. The results show an accuracy of 95.5% during training and 95.3% in validation for detecting and counting HT-29 cells. HT-29 cell detection and counting using deep learning is novel due to the scarcity of research in this area, the application of deep learning, and potential performance improvements over traditional methods. By addressing a gap in the literature, employing a unique dataset, and using custom model architecture, this approach contributes to advancing colon cancer understanding and diagnosis techniques.