Label-free detection of cellular drug responses by high-throughput bright-field imaging and machine learning

Sci Rep. 2017 Sep 29;7(1):12454. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-12378-4.

Abstract

In the last decade, high-content screening based on multivariate single-cell imaging has been proven effective in drug discovery to evaluate drug-induced phenotypic variations. Unfortunately, this method inherently requires fluorescent labeling which has several drawbacks. Here we present a label-free method for evaluating cellular drug responses only by high-throughput bright-field imaging with the aid of machine learning algorithms. Specifically, we performed high-throughput bright-field imaging of numerous drug-treated and -untreated cells (N = ~240,000) by optofluidic time-stretch microscopy with high throughput up to 10,000 cells/s and applied machine learning to the cell images to identify their morphological variations which are too subtle for human eyes to detect. Consequently, we achieved a high accuracy of 92% in distinguishing drug-treated and -untreated cells without the need for labeling. Furthermore, we also demonstrated that dose-dependent, drug-induced morphological change from different experiments can be inferred from the classification accuracy of a single classification model. Our work lays the groundwork for label-free drug screening in pharmaceutical science and industry.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Antineoplastic Agents, Phytogenic / pharmacology*
  • Cell Shape / drug effects
  • Dose-Response Relationship, Drug
  • High-Throughput Screening Assays
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / statistics & numerical data*
  • MCF-7 Cells
  • Machine Learning*
  • Microfluidics / instrumentation
  • Microfluidics / methods
  • Microscopy, Interference / instrumentation
  • Microscopy, Interference / methods*
  • Paclitaxel / pharmacology*

Substances

  • Antineoplastic Agents, Phytogenic
  • Paclitaxel