Evidential Uncertainty-Guided Mitochondria Segmentation for 3D EM Images

Abstract

Recent advances in deep learning have greatly improved the segmentation of mitochondria from Electron Microscopy (EM) images. However, suffering from variations in mitochondrial morphology, imaging conditions, and image noise, existing methods still exhibit high uncertainty in their predictions. Moreover, in view of our findings, predictions with high levels of uncertainty are often accompanied by inaccuracies such as ambiguous boundaries and amount of false positive segments. To deal with the above problems, we propose a novel approach for mitochondria segmentation in 3D EM images that leverages evidential uncertainty estimation, which for the first time integrates evidential uncertainty to enhance the performance of segmentation. To be more specific, our proposed method not only provides accurate segmentation results, but also estimates associated uncertainty. Then, the estimated uncertainty is used to help improve the segmentation performance by an uncertainty rectification module, which leverages uncertainty maps and multi-scale information to refine the segmentation. Extensive experiments conducted on four challenging benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over existing approaches.