Few-shot hypercolumn-based mitochondria segmentation in cardiac and outer hair cells in focused ion beam-scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) data.

Journal: Pattern recognition letters
Published Date:

Abstract

We present a novel AI-based approach to the few-shot automated segmentation of mitochondria in large-scale electron microscopy images. Our framework leverages convolutional features from a pre-trained deep multilayer convolutional neural network, such as VGG-16. We then train a binary gradient boosting classifier on the resulting high-dimensional feature hypercolumns. We extract VGG-16 features from the first four convolutional blocks and apply bilinear upsampling to resize the obtained maps to the input image size. This procedure yields a 2688-dimensional feature hypercolumn for each pixel in a 224 × 224 input image. We then apply -regularized logistic regression for supervised active feature selection to reduce dependencies among the features, to reduce overfitting, as well as to speed-up gradient boosting-based training. During inference we block process 1728 × 2022 large microscopy images. Our experiments show that in such a formulation of transfer learning our processing pipeline is able to achieve high-accuracy results on very challenging datasets containing a large number of irregularly shaped mitochondria in cardiac and outer hair cells. Our proposed few-shot training approach gives competitive performance with the state-of-the-art using far less training data.

Authors

  • Julia Dietlmeier
    Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland.
  • Kevin McGuinness
    Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland.
  • Sandra Rugonyi
    Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, Oregon, USA.
  • Teresa Wilson
    Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, Oregon, USA.
  • Alfred Nuttall
    Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, Oregon, USA.
  • Noel E O'Connor
    Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland.

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