MORE IS DIFFERENT: DRUG PROPERTY ANALYSIS ON CELLULAR HIGH-CONTENT IMAGES USING DEEP LEARNING

ABSTRACT High-content analysis (HCA) holds enormous potential for drug discovery and research, but widely used methods can be cumbersome and yield inaccurate results. Noise and high similarity in cell images impede the accuracy of deep learning-based image analysis. To address these issues, we introduce More Is Different (MID), a novel HCA method that combines cellular experiments, image processing, and deep learning modeling. MID effectively combines the convolutional neural network and Transformer to encode high-content images, effectively filtering out noisy signals and characterizing cell phenotypes with high precision. In comparative tests on drug-induced cardiotoxicity and mitochondrial toxicity classification, as well as compound classification, MID outperformed both DeepProfiler and CellProfiler, which are two highly recognized methods in HCA. We believe that our results demonstrate the utility and versatility of MID and anticipate its widespread adoption in HCA for advancing drug development and disease research.