Characterizing the feeding patterns of microzooplanktons using digital holographic microscopy and deep learning

Phytoplankton are responsible for approximately 50% of the biological fixation of carbon dioxide and oxygen production on Earth. The majority of the phytoplankton production is consumed by single-celled microscopic grazers, microzooplankton. In this experiment, we reproduce a small-scale alias of the plankton world to understand their feeding behavior. We use a lens-less holographic approach, driven by deep learning powered DeepTrack 2.0. We use a combination of U-net and CNN architectures to decipher the properties of radius, refractive index, heights and drymass of plankton. We further compare the results with standard approaches.