Deep learning takes on tumours

As cancer cells spread in a culture dish, Guillaume Jacquemet is watching. The cell movements hold clues to how drugs or gene variants might affect the spread of tumours in the body, and he is tracking the nucleus of each cell in frame after frame of time-lapse microscopy films. But because he has generated about 500 films, each with 120 frames and 200–300 cells per frame, that analysis is challenging to say the least. "If I had to do the tracking manually, it would be impossible," says Jacquemet, a cell biologist at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland. So he has trained a machine to spot the nuclei instead.