Multi-Modality Microscopy Image Style Transfer for Nuclei Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GAN-based style transfer method for microscopy images that enhances nuclei segmentation by improving robustness across different modalities and conditions, reducing annotation effort.

Contribution

A novel microscopy-style augmentation technique using disentangled representations that handles multiple modalities and lighting conditions for nuclei segmentation.

Findings

Significant increase in segmentation accuracy with style augmentation.

Improved robustness to data heterogeneity in microscopy images.

Enhanced performance of nuclei segmentation algorithms across diverse datasets.

Abstract

Annotating microscopy images for nuclei segmentation is laborious and time-consuming. To leverage the few existing annotations, also across multiple modalities, we propose a novel microscopy-style augmentation technique based on a generative adversarial network (GAN). Unlike other style transfer methods, it can not only deal with different cell assay types and lighting conditions, but also with different imaging modalities, such as bright-field and fluorescence microscopy. Using disentangled representations for content and style, we can preserve the structure of the original image while altering its style during augmentation. We evaluate our data augmentation on the 2018 Data Science Bowl dataset consisting of various cell assays, lighting conditions, and imaging modalities. With our style augmentation, the segmentation accuracy of the two top-ranked Mask R-CNN-based nuclei segmentation algorithms in the competition increases significantly. Thus, our augmentation technique renders the downstream task more robust to the test data heterogeneity and helps counteract class imbalance without resampling of minority classes.