Unravelling cell biology through artificial intelligence

The AI algorithm was able to predict the presence and the location of nuclei in more than 8,000 cells. Scientists from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore have used artificial intelligence (AI) to demonstrate a correlation between cytoskeleton organisation and nuclear position. The study was recently published in PLOS. To ensure that the study's parameters would not be limited by human conceptualisation, they developed a unique generative algorithm to interpret the cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells using qualitative data, without telling the system what it was observing and how to measure it. "We separated the information related to the nucleus and the fibres in independent databases of images, ensuring that there was not any information about the nucleus found in the images of the fibres, so that the system could not cheat. Then we trained the system to find the location of the nucleus using only information specific to fibres. To do so, the system had to take the qualitative data and figure out on its own if there was a relation between the organisation of the fibres and the position of the nucleus. This forced the programme to find the parameters defining the system, free from human interpretation and predefined concepts," Associate Professor Javier G. Fernandez explained.