A semi-automated algorithm for image analysis of respiratory organoids

Respiratory organoids have emerged as a powerful in vitro model for studying respiratory diseases and drug discovery. However, the high-throughput analysis of organoid images remains a challenge due to the lack of automated and accurate segmentation tools. This study presents a semi-automatic algorithm for image analysis of respiratory organoids (nasal and lung organoids), employing the U-Net architecture and CellProfiler for organoids segmentation. The algorithm processes bright-field images acquired through z-stack fusion and stitching. The model demonstrated a high level of accuracy, as evidenced by an intersection-over-union metric (IoU) of 0.8856, F1-score = 0.937 and an accuracy of 0.9953. Applied to forskolin-induced swelling assays of lung organoids, the algorithm successfully quantified functional differences in Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane conductance Regulator (CFTR)-channel activity between healthy donor and cystic fibrosis patient-derived organoids, without fluorescent dyes. Additionally, an open-source dataset of 827 annotated respiratory organoid images was provided to facilitate further research. Our results demonstrate the potential of deep learning to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of high-throughput respiratory organoid analysis for future therapeutic screening applications. ©: © 2025 Demchenko et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.