RAnking Markers for CEll Segmentation

To use RAMCES, first type in the following commands into your command line.

git clone https://github.com/mbruhns/ramces/
cd ramces

RAMCES requires python (>=3.7). We highly recommend creating a separate conda environment to use RAMCES.

conda create -n <envName> python=3.8
conda activate <envName> 
pip install .

This section describes how you can use RAMCES to rank markers and create weighted images on your own data. To do this, use the rank_markers.py script. There are a number of arguments that you must specify; you can see these options by running

python rank_markers.py -h

Before you can use RAMCES, you will need to have the following files prepared:

1. The trained model file (--model-path)

   By default, this will be the already-trained CNN model models/trained_model.h5. Unless you have your own trained model that you want to use, you do not need to specify anything here.

2. The image data, CODEX or otherwise (--data-dir)

   Put all of the data in a single directory. The data must be formatted in one of the following ways. A future update of this repository will allow for a wider range of data formats, but for now it is optimized for CODEX images taken in cycles.

   • Individual TIFF files for each marker
     • There must be a single 2D TIFF file for each marker/protein for every tile in the dataset. This means that if there are 16 image tiles and 20 distinct proteins profiled, there would be 320 TIFF files in the data directory.
     • Each TIFF filename should contain the following patterns to specify the cycle and channel of each file (and hence specify the marker):
       • tXXX for cycle number, starting at 1
       • cXXX for channel number, starting at 1
       • The tile number should also be specified in some way, but there is no required pattern for this.
       • For example, the filename for a marker at cycle 3, channel 2 at tile 5 could be: mydataset_0005_t003_c002.tif
   • Multi-channel TIFF files
     • There is a single 4D TIFF file for each tile in the dataset. The shape can be either (cycle, channel, height, width) or (channel, cycle, height, width). For example, if there are 16 cycles and 4 channels, then a valid file dimension/shape would be (16, 4, height, width).
     • There is no specific filename format required in this case. However, each file should have the same shape and channel ordering.

   Note: This setup assumes that the images are already at the optimal/most focused z-plane.

3. A CSV file with two columns listing the marker channel name and whether the channel should be scored by RAMCES (--channels)

   An example file with a total of 9 channels and 5 markers/proteins to input to RAMCES would look like:

   DAPI, False
   CD20, True
   CD4, True
   DAPI1, False
   CD45, True
   CD8, True
   DAPI2, False
   Podoplanin, True
   Blank, False
   

There are two items that RAMCES outputs when using the rank_markers.py script:

1. Marker ranking and scores (--rank-path)

   The script will output a csv file that gives the scores (between 0 and 1) for each marker. The higher the score, the more confident RAMCES is that the marker is suitable for cell segmentation. The filename/path must be specified in the --rank-path argument.

2. Weighted images (--create-images, --num-weighted, --output-weighted, optional)

   If the --create-images flag is set, then the script will output images that combine the top n=num-weighted ranked membrane markers, weighted by the scores given by RAMCES. The number of top ranked markers to use is given by the --num-weighted argument. The files are saved to the directory specified by the --output-weighted argument. The --exclude argument is also available to specify the rank of any markers that you wish to exclude from the combined weighted images (which may be useful if there are markers that are ranked highly by RAMCES but are unsuitable to use for segmentation).

A small demo dataset can be found in the demo/ directory. There are 19 distinct markers of interest in this dataset. To output marker rankings and scores from RAMCES and save the combined weighted images for the top 3 markers, run the following:

python rank_markers.py --data-dir ./demo/data --channels ./demo/channels.csv --num-cycles 7 --num-channels-per-cycle 4 --rank-path ./demo/ranking.csv --create-images --num-weighted 3 --output-weighted ./demo/output --exclude 1

This will output the ranking.csv file in the demo/ directory, which gives the scores given to each marker in the dataset. The output images will be saved in demo/output/. Note that we have used the --exclude argument here to exclude the top-ranked marker in the output weighted image.

A future update of this repository will include instructions on how to train a CNN model with your own data. This may be desirable if your data is dissimilar to the CODEX data RAMCES was originally trained on.