Finally, although it is often sufficient to quantify each subtype of hair cell and record their position along the length of the cochlea, more sophisticated assessment and quantification might reveal additional characteristics beyond cell loss, such as hair bundle disarray 8. However, with thousands of hair cells per cochlea, this task becomes time-consuming and is rarely performed, necessitating the development and use of automated analysis tools. Therefore, when evaluating trauma and/or treatment outcomes, researchers often need to assess hair cell loss on a large scale, along the cochlear spiral. This creates a gradient of therapeutic concentration and potentially, efficacy 7. A common route of drug delivery to the inner ear is through the round window membrane, which is located at the base of the cochlea 6. Similarly, tonotopic effects are also often evaluated when testing various therapeutics and insults to the cochlea. Hair cells at the base of the cochlea are generally most vulnerable to damage, putting the detection of high-frequency sounds at the highest risk of loss, from both insult and aging. Similarly, efforts to develop otoprotective therapeutics require detailed quantification of hair cell survival. The severity of damage, and critically, where it has occurred, are required to fully characterize the extent of any cochlear trauma. As such, hair cell death leads to permanent sensorineural hearing loss. Mammalian cochlear hair cells are terminally differentiated and do not regenerate 4, 5. Hair cells are essential for sound perception however, they are sensitive to damage or loss as a result of cochlear insult 3. Hair cells at the basal end of the cochlea are tuned to high-frequency sounds, while those at the apex are maximally sensitive to low frequencies. The cochlea is tonotopically organized 2, with the critical frequency to which hair cells respond most strongly determined by location. Organized along the length of the cochlea in a highly regular lattice, hair cells are subdivided into two types: three rows of outer hair cells (OHCs), which amplify mechanical vibration and one row of inner hair cells (IHCs), which translate that vibration into neural signals 1. In response to the mechanical force of sound, vibrations of the tympanic membrane are transmitted along the cochlea in a travelling wave, leading to the stimulation of sensory hair cells. It contains thousands of highly specialized mechanically sensitive cells, called hair cells. The cochlea is the hearing organ of the mammalian inner ear.

By providing this dataset, we aim to give other hearing research groups the opportunity to develop their own tools with which to analyze cochlear imaging data more fully, accurately, and with greater ease. With suggested usage parameters and a well-described annotation procedure, this collection can facilitate the development of generalizable cochlear hair-cell detection models or serve as a starting point for fine-tuning models for other analysis tasks.

This dataset is the result of a collaborative effort from multiple laboratories and has been carefully curated to represent a variety of imaging techniques. The dataset includes over 107,000 hair cells which have been identified and annotated as either inner or outer hair cells.

The collection includes samples from mouse, rat, guinea pig, pig, primate, and human cochlear tissue, from normal conditions and following in-vivo and in-vitro ototoxic drug application. In this study, we present a large collection of annotated cochlear hair-cell datasets, labeled with commonly used hair-cell markers and imaged using various fluorescence microscopy techniques. Machine learning can be used to automate the quantification process but requires a vast and diverse dataset for effective training. It is often desirable in hearing research to quantify the number of hair cells within cochlear samples, in both pathological conditions, and in response to treatment. Each cochlea contains 5–15 thousand terminally differentiated hair cells, and their survival is essential for hearing as they do not regenerate after insult. Our sense of hearing is mediated by cochlear hair cells, of which there are two types organized in one row of inner hair cells and three rows of outer hair cells. Scientific Data volume 11, Article number: 416 ( 2024) Large-scale annotated dataset for cochlear hair cell detection and classification

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