Glioma C6 dataset for cell segmentation

Training and test images of Glioma C6 cells imaged using phase-contrast microscopy for the task of cell segmentation.

The example shows a phase-contrast image of Glioma C6 cells and the manually annotated segmentation mask.

Data type: Phase-contrast images with corresponding annotations in COCO format.

Microscopy data type: 2D phase-contrast images recorded at 24 or 72-hour intervals after cell seeding.

Microscope: BestScope BS-2092 microscope in phase-contrast mode, equipped with 10× and 20× objective lenses.

Cell type: C6 glioma cells (rat glial tumor cells, ATCC CCL-107).

Image size: 2592 × 1944 px² .

File format: .tif (8-bit).

File naming convention: The file names include the cultivation time (24h or 72h) and the microscope objective lens (10× or 20×), e.g., spec_24h_10x_17.tif.

Dataset subsets:

• Glioma C6-spec: 45 images captured under strictly controlled imaging conditions, divided into training (30 images), validation (4 images), and test (11 images) subsets.
• Glioma C6-gen: 30 images captured under varied imaging and seeding conditions, designed to test model generalization.

Annotations:

• Over 20,000 annotated objects across both subsets, including 12,000 cell annotations and 7,800 nucleus annotations.
• Glioma C6-spec annotations include Type A cells (spheroids formed by cells either unattached to substrates or at the initial stage of cell division), Type B cells (elongated cells with distinct poles, growth phase) and nuclei.
• Glioma C6-gen subset annotations consist only of general cell instances, without differentiation into types or nuclei.

Article reference:

"Glioma C6: A Novel Dataset for Training and Benchmarking Cell Segmentation," Malashin et al., 2025.

Authors: 

Roman Malashin¹ ², Svetlana Pashkevich³, Daniil Ilyukhin¹, Arseniy Volkov³, Valeria Yachnaya¹ ², Andrey Denisov³, Maria Mikhalkova¹

Affiliation(s): 

¹ Pavlov Institute of Physiology, Russian Academy of Science

² Saint-Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation, Russia

³ Institute of Physiology, NAS of Belarus