Abstract Mitochondria play an essential role in the life cycle of eukaryotic cells. However, we still don’t know how their ultrastructure, like the cristae of the inner membrane, dynamically evolves to regulate these fundamental functions, in response to external conditions or during interaction with other cell components. Although high-resolution fluorescent microscopy coupled with recently developed innovative probes can reveal this structural organization, their long-term, fast and live 3D imaging remains challenging. To address this problem, we have developed a convolutional neural network (CNN), called DeepCristae, to restore mitochondrial cristae in low spatial resolution microscopy images. Our CNN is trained from 2D STED images using a novel loss specifically designed for cristae restoration. Random sampling centered on mitochondrial areas was also developed to improve training efficiency. Quantitative assessments were carried out using metrics we derived to give a meaningful measure of cristae restoration. Depending on the conditions of use indicated, DeepCristae works well on broad microscopy modalities (STED, Live-SR, AiryScan and LLSM). It is ultimately applied in the context of mitochondrial network dynamics during interaction with endo/lysosomes membranes.

DeepCristae, a CNN for the restoration of mitochondria cristae in live microscopy images