Fully unsupervised deep mode of action learning for phenotyping high-content cellular images

The identification and discovery of phenotypes from high content screening (HCS) images is a challenging task. Earlier works use image analysis pipelines to extract biological features, supervised training methods or generate features with neural networks pretrained on non-cellular images. We introduce a novel fully unsupervised deep learning algorithm to cluster cellular images with similar Mode-of-Action together using only the images’ pixel intensity values as input. The method outperforms existing approaches on the labelled subset of the BBBC021 dataset and achieves an accuracy of 97.09% for correctly classifying the Mode-of-Action (MOA) by nearest neighbors matching. One unique aspect of the approach is that it is able to perform training on the entire unannotated dataset, to correctly cluster similar treatments beyond the annotated subset of the dataset and can be used for novel MOA discovery.