No because in a well designed experiment the baselines would be control measurements performed for the purpose of the experiment on the cell lines in question.

No because in a well designed experiment the baselines would be control measurements performed for the purpose of the experiment on the cell lines in question. In general cellular morphology is a proxy for more direct measurements. For example, you could imagine that some drug induces metabolic changes in cancer cells, and pick it up by noting the cells look a bit different or you could directly measure the metabolic changes using an FL system. Its not obvious what these measurements produce a baseline for.