# Implicit Neural Representations for Generative Modeling of Living Cell Shapes

Source: [Implicit Neural Representations for Generative Modeling of Living Cell Shapes](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6d8c1e209131cea3a84f>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-01-04T05:17:38.466Z

Authors: David Wiesner, Julian Suk, Sven Dummer, David Svoboda, Jelmer M. Wolterink

Published: 2022-07-13T15:28:07.000Z

## Abstract

Methods allowing the synthesis of realistic cell shapes could help generate training data sets to improve cell tracking and segmentation in biomedical images. Deep generative models for cell shape synthesis require a light-weight and flexible representation of the cell shape. However, commonly used voxel-based representations are unsuitable for high-resolution shape synthesis, and polygon meshes have limitations when modeling topology changes such as cell growth or mitosis. In this work, we propose to use level sets of signed distance functions (SDFs) to represent cell shapes. We optimize a neural network as an implicit neural representation of the SDF value at any point in a 3D+time domain. The model is conditioned on a latent code, thus allowing the synthesis of new and unseen shape sequences. We validate our approach quantitatively and qualitatively on C. elegans cells that grow and divide, and lung cancer cells with growing complex filopodial protrusions. Our results show that shape descriptors of synthetic cells resemble those of real cells, and that our model is able to generate topologically plausible sequences of complex cell shapes in 3D+time.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Cell Shape Generation on C. elegans (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/cell-shape-generation-on-c-elegans-test.md>): Cell Shape Generation; C. elegans (test); Size (µm³): 36.5.

- [Cell Shape Generation on Filopodial cells (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/cell-shape-generation-on-filopodial-cells-test.md>): Cell Shape Generation; Filopodial cells (test); Volume (µm³): 51.7.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.06283>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.06283.pdf>)

[Implementation](<https://cbia.fi.muni.cz/research/simulations/implicit_shapes.html>)