Computer vision for human stem cell derived cardiomyocyte classification: The induced pluripotent vs embryonic stem cell case study

Human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hIPSC-CMs) represent a potential valuable alternative to human embryonic stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hESC-CMs) for the lack of ethical issues and their patient-specificity. Recent studies showed hIPSC-CMs behave like hESC-CMs in terms of membrane currents, contractility and frequency of spontaneous pacing but their similarities need to be studied more. In this work we applied a well tested image processing approach based on texture feature extraction (local binary patterns, Haralick features and threshold adjacency statistics) and classification by support vector machines to hIPSC-CMs and hESC-CMs images from contrast phase microscopy. Our results showed the good discrimination power of the chosen feature set meaning that some structural differences can still remain between the two cell classes.