Democratized image analytics by visual programming through integration of deep models and small-scale machine learning

Deep learning1 has revolutionized the field of biomedical image analysis. Conventional approaches have used problem-specific algorithms to describe images with manually crafted features, such as cell morphology, count, intensity, and texture. Feature learning with deep convolutional neural networks is implicit, and training the network usually focuses on particular tasks, such as breast cancer detection in mammography2, subcellular protein localization3, or plant disease detection4. Training a deep network usually requires a large number of images, which limits its utility. For example, the classifier for plant disease detection by Mohanty et al.4 was trained on 54,306 images of diseased and healthy plants, and the yeast protein localization model by Kraus et al.3 was inferred from 22,000 annotated images, but not everyone who could benefit from image analysis has so many well-annotated images.