  In this paper, we consider the problem of automatically segmenting neuronal
cells in dual-color confocal microscopy images. This problem is a key task in
various quantitative analysis applications in neuroscience, such as tracing
cell genesis in Danio rerio (zebrafish) brains. Deep learning, especially using
fully convolutional networks (FCN), has profoundly changed segmentation
research in biomedical imaging. We face two major challenges in this problem.
First, neuronal cells may form dense clusters, making it difficult to correctly
identify all individual cells (even to human experts). Consequently,
segmentation results of the known FCN-type models are not accurate enough.
Second, pixel-wise ground truth is difficult to obtain. Only a limited amount
of approximate instance-wise annotation can be collected, which makes the
training of FCN models quite cumbersome. We propose a new FCN-type deep
learning model, called deep complete bipartite networks (CB-Net), and a new
scheme for leveraging approximate instance-wise annotation to train our
pixel-wise prediction model. Evaluated using seven real datasets, our proposed
new CB-Net model outperforms the state-of-the-art FCN models and produces
neuron segmentation results of remarkable quality
