Learning Channel Importance for High Content Imaging with Interpretable
  Deep Input Channel Mixing
Daniel Siegismund Mario Wieser Stephan Heyse Stephan Steigele
Uncovering novel drug candidates for treating complex diseases remain one of
the most challenging tasks in early discovery research. To tackle this
challenge, biopharma research established a standardized high content imaging
protocol that tags different cellular compartments per image channel. In order
to judge the experimental outcome, the scientist requires knowledge about the
channel importance with respect to a certain phenotype for decoding the
underlying biology. In contrast to traditional image analysis approaches, such
experiments are nowadays preferably analyzed by deep learning based approaches
which, however, lack crucial information about the channel importance. To
overcome this limitation, we present a novel approach which utilizes
multi-spectral information of high content images to interpret a certain aspect
of cellular biology. To this end, we base our method on image blending concepts
with alpha compositing for an arbitrary number of channels. More specifically,
we introduce DCMIX, a lightweight, scaleable and end-to-end trainable mixing
layer which enables interpretable predictions in high content imaging while
retaining the benefits of deep learning based methods. We employ an extensive
set of experiments on both MNIST and RXRX1 datasets, demonstrating that DCMIX
learns the biologically relevant channel importance without scarifying
prediction performance.