DFG Funding for SCOPE-AI: Advancing AI-Based Organoid Analysis

The SCOPE-AI research project, involving CPI faculty member Prof. Dr. Mareike Lehmann, has been awarded funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within its programme “Data Corpora for Artificial Intelligence”.

SCOPE-AI – Structured Corpora of Organoids across Phenotypes and Biological Scales for AI – aims to create large, high-quality and openly accessible imaging datasets of organoids to support the development of artificial intelligence-based analysis tools. Organoids are increasingly used to model human diseases and investigate potential therapies, but their microscopic analysis is still often time-consuming and dependent on manual assessment.

The project will combine bright-field and fluorescence microscopy images of human and mouse organoids from different organs, including the lung, intestine and kidney. The resulting datasets will enable AI models to detect and characterize organoids and to identify biologically relevant phenotypes such as cell proliferation, apoptosis and differentiation. SCOPE-AI will also explore whether information usually obtained by fluorescence staining can be predicted directly from label-free bright-field images, potentially enabling faster and less invasive organoid analysis.

The interdisciplinary consortium brings together expertise in organoid biology, biomedical imaging and artificial intelligence from Philipps University Marburg, Helmholtz Munich and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) Heidelberg. The project is led by Prof. Dr. Mareike Lehmann, Dr. Marie Piraud, Prof. Dr. Thomas Worzfeld and Dr. Jens Puschhof.

Congratulations to Prof. Dr. Mareike Lehmann and the entire SCOPE-AI team on this successful DFG funding!