Deep learning-assisted cellular imaging for evaluating acrylamide toxicity through phenotypic changes

Acrylamide (AA), a food hazard generated during thermal processing, poses significant safety risks due to its toxicity. Conventional methods for AA toxicology are time-consuming and inadequate for analyzing cellular morphology. This study developed a novel approach combining deep learning models (U-Net and ResNet34) with cell fluorescence imaging. U-Net was used for cell segmentation, generating a single-cell dataset, while ResNet34 trained the dataset over 200 epochs, achieving an 80 % validation accuracy. This method predicts AA concentration ranges by matching cell fluorescence features with the dataset and analyzes cellular phenotypic changes under AA exposure using k-means clustering and CellProfiler. The approach overcomes the limitations of traditional toxicological methods, offering a direct link between cell phenotypes and hazard toxicology. It provides a high-throughput, accurate solution to evaluate AA toxicology and refines the understanding of its cellular impacts.