Learning 3D biophysical cell properties from 2D images and cell-population statistics

arXiv:2609.22410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inferring 3D cellular properties from 2D microscopy is difficult when a reference instrument reports only population statistics rather than labels for individual cells. Here we develop a population-supervised framework that maps single 2D red-cell images to latent biophysical quantities and aggregates them to mean corpuscular volume, red-cell distribution width and mean corpuscular haemoglobin. The model combines shared local inference, a biophysically structured decoder for volume and haemoglobin, learned instance weighting and device-specific calibration. We formalise conditions under which aggregate observations identify restricted instance predictors, show why population agreement does not by itself identify single-cell properties or 3D geometry, and derive the dispersion penalty induced by subset mean matching. The development dataset comprises 390 specimens and 1,105 acquisitions across six devices, with reported Pearson correlations of 0.86--0.98 against a Sysmex analyser. The framework provides a testable route from 2D images and population supervision to 3D cellular biophysics without claiming explicit 3D reconstruction.