Segment Any Cell: A SAM-based Auto-prompting Fine-tuning Framework for Nuclei Segmentation
About
In the rapidly evolving field of AI research, foundational models like BERT and GPT have significantly advanced language and vision tasks. The advent of pretrain-prompting models such as ChatGPT and Segmentation Anything Model (SAM) has further revolutionized image segmentation. However, their applications in specialized areas, particularly in nuclei segmentation within medical imaging, reveal a key challenge: the generation of high-quality, informative prompts is as crucial as applying state-of-the-art (SOTA) fine-tuning techniques on foundation models. To address this, we introduce Segment Any Cell (SAC), an innovative framework that enhances SAM specifically for nuclei segmentation. SAC integrates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) within the attention layer of the Transformer to improve the fine-tuning process, outperforming existing SOTA methods. It also introduces an innovative auto-prompt generator that produces effective prompts to guide segmentation, a critical factor in handling the complexities of nuclei segmentation in biomedical imaging. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of SAC in nuclei segmentation tasks, proving its effectiveness as a tool for pathologists and researchers. Our contributions include a novel prompt generation strategy, automated adaptability for diverse segmentation tasks, the innovative application of Low-Rank Attention Adaptation in SAM, and a versatile framework for semantic segmentation challenges.