deepBlink: Threshold-independent detection and localization of diffraction-limited spots

Abstract

Detection of diffraction-limited spots is traditionally performed with mathematical operators designed for idealized spots. This process requires manual tuning of parameters that is time-consuming and not always reliable. We have developed deepBlink, a neural network-based method to detect and localize spots automatically and demonstrate that deepBlink outperforms state-of-the-art methods across six publicly available datasets. deepBlink is open-sourced on PyPI and GitHub (https://github.com/BBQuercus/deepBlink) as a ready-to-use command-line interface.