Why the study?
Traditional invasive methods for assessing beat-level synchrony in cardiomyocyte clusters have substantial limitations, and conventional computer vision methods struggle to resolve densely packed, adherent clusters.
Does the CardioSegNet deep learning framework improve the segmentation accuracy and the characterization of beating dynamics and synchrony in cardiomyocyte clusters compared to conventional models?
Does the CardioSegNet deep learning framework improve the segmentation accuracy and the characterization of beating dynamics and synchrony in cardiomyocyte clusters compared to conventional models?
CardioSegNet provides a highly accurate, label-free multi-task deep learning pipeline for segmenting densely packed cardiomyocyte clusters and quantifying their beating dynamics and synchrony in vitro.
CardioSegNet enables non-invasive synchrony analysis in adherent cardiomyocyte clusters; leaves open validation before research or clinical adoption.
Beat-level synchrony among cardiomyocyte clusters is a critical indicator of cardiac electromechanical function. Traditional invasive approaches have substantial limitations, and conventional computer vision methods are poorly suited for resolving densely packed, adherent clusters. To address these challenges, we developed an analysis framework to characterize the beating characteristics of cardiomyocyte clusters from microscopic imaging data. Specifically, we propose CardioSegNet, a multi-task deep learning model that combines attention mechanisms with three prediction heads (semantic segmentation, contour detection, and distance transform), followed by a watershed algorithm to achieve high-accuracy cluster-level segmentation of cardiomyocyte clusters. The Pixel-Difference method is applied to extract time-series beating signals from each segmented cluster and compute several dynamic parameters, including beating amplitude, period, frequency, and the Beat Rate Irregularity (BRI). We further introduce PeriodAwareNAPTDij to quantify the beating synchrony among different clusters. Our experimental results show that CardioSegNet achieves a Dice coefficient of 0.8868 and an HD95 of 93.02 µm on an independent test set, demonstrating strong segmentation performance. The cardiomyocyte populations are not uniformly globally synchronized; rather, they consist of multiple local subgroups with high internal synchrony, and the degree of synchronization between clusters is positively correlated with their physical distance. This label-free analytical pipeline provides an efficient tool for myocardial function evaluation and cardiotoxicity screening in vitro.
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Wang et al. (2026) studied this question.
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