In microscopy image cell segmentation, it is common to train a deep neural network on source data, containing different types of microscopy images, and then fine-tune it using a support set comprising a few randomly selected and annotated training target images. In this paper, we argue that the random selection of unlabelled training target images to be annotated and included in the support set may not enable an effective fine-tuning process, so we propose a new approach to optimise this image selection process. Our approach involves a new scoring function to find informative unlabelled target images. In particular, we propose to measure the consistency in the model predictions on target images against specific data augmentations. However, we observe that the model trained with source datasets does not reliably evaluate consistency on target images. To alleviate this problem, we propose novel self-supervised pretext tasks to compute the scores of unlabelled target images. Finally, the top few images with the least consistency scores are added to the support set for oracle (i.e., expert) annotation and later used to fine-tune the model to the target images. In our evaluations that involve the segmentation of five different types of cell images, we demonstrate promising results on several target test sets compared to the random selection approach as well as other selection approaches, such as Shannon's entropy and Monte-Carlo dropout.

No abstract

Figure 1: Depth prediction (center) and absolute relative error (right) from a model trained on KITTI for images from KITTI (top, left; in-distribution: ID) and virtual KITTI (bottom, left; out-of-distribution: OOD):The depth prediction for virtual KITTI, which is not represented in the training distribution, is incorrect; therefore, the error is too high.

Automatic cell segmentation in microscopy images works well with the support of deep neural networks trained with full supervision. Collecting and annotating images, though, is not a sustainable solution for every new microscopy database and cell type. Instead, we assume that we can access a plethora of annotated image data sets from different domains (sources) and a limited number of annotated image data sets from the domain of interest (target), where each domain denotes not only different image appearance but also a different type of cell segmentation problem. We pose this problem as meta-learning where the goal is to learn a generic and adaptable few-shot learning model from the available source domain data sets and cell segmentation tasks. The model can be afterwards fine-tuned on the few annotated images of the target domain that contains different image appearance and different cell type. In our meta-learning training, we propose the combination of three objective functions to segment the cells, move the segmentation results away from the classification boundary using cross-domain tasks, and learn an invariant representation between tasks of the source domains. Our experiments on five public databases show promising results from 1-to 10-shot meta-learning using standard segmentation neural network architectures.