IntroductionExperimental bone research often generates large amounts of histology and histomorphometry data, and the analysis of these data can be time-consuming and trivial. Machine learning offers a viable alternative to manual analysis for measuring e.g. bone volume versus total volume.The objective was to develop a neural network for image segmentation, and to assess the accuracy of this network when applied to ectopic bone formation samples compared to a ground truth.MethodThirteen tissue slides totaling 114 megapixels of ectopic bone formation were selected for model building. Slides were split into training, validation, and test data, with the test data reserved and only used for the final model assessment. We developed a neural network resembling U-Net that takes 512×512 pixel tiles. To improve model robustness, images were augmented online during training.The network was trained for 3 days on a NVidia Tesla K80 provided by a free online learning platform against ground truth masks annotated by an experienced researcher.ResultDuring training, the validation accuracy improved and stabilised at approx. 95%. The test accuracy was 96.1 %.ConclusionMost experiments using ectopic bone formation will yield an inter-observer or inter-method variance of far more than 5%, so the current approach may be a valid and feasible technique for automated image segmentation for large datasets. More data or a consensus-based ground truth may improve training stability and validation accuracy.The code and data of this project are available upon request and will be available online as part of our publication.
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