UNet-ECA-Bio: a biologically informed deep learning model for high-throughput micro-phenotyping of rice stem vascular bundles.

Abstract

Rice stem internal structure is a critical micro-phenotype influencing lodging resistance and yield; however, its analysis remains constrained by labor-intensive manual methods. Here, we present a publicly available dataset of 686 rice stem cross-sections, with 21,027 large vascular bundles (LVBs) and 19,342 small vascular bundles (SVBs) manually annotated. Five deep learning architectures were systematically evaluated, among which UNet-VGG16 achieved the best performance with a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 87.4% (82.49% for LVBs and 74.41% for SVBs). An improved model, UNet-ECA-Bio, further raised mIoU to 89.32% and SVB IoU to 78.97% by integrating Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) and biologically informed class weighting using an image-level dataset. Leveraging these high-accuracy phenotypic predictions, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) indicated concordance between annotated and predicted traits, with SNP overlap rates of 96% (LVB count: 1,217/1,262), 43% (SVB count: 6/14), 98% (stem area: 122/124), and 100% (cavity area: 3/3) at −log10(p) ≥ 6. Meanwhile, compared with manual annotation (estimated 10–30 minutes per image), the proposed approach processed all 686 images within 10 minutes, representing a >600-fold increase in throughput. We further developed a user-friendly software tool, “Rice_Stem_Pre_V1.1.exe,” for automated phenotyping of 14 stem traits, providing a cost-effective platform for genetic studies of lodging resistance and yield improvement.

Plant phenotyping relevance

イネ茎維管束の画像から複数の表現型形質を自動抽出する深層学習モデル、データセット、検証、ソフトウェアを中心的に開発しており、明確な植物フェノタイピング手法研究である。

Code and data availability

本文中に内容が明示された植物フェノタイピング関連の補足表と、その公開リンクを確認しました。