SAM4EM: Efficient memory-based two stage prompt-free segment anything model adapter for complex 3D neuroscience electron microscopy stacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shah, Uzair, Agus, Marco, Boges, Daniya, Chiappini, Vanessa, Alzubaidi, Mahmood, Schneider, Jens, Hadwiger, Markus, Magistretti, Pierre J., Househ, Mowafa, Calı, Corrado
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shah, Uzair
Agus, Marco
Boges, Daniya
Chiappini, Vanessa
Alzubaidi, Mahmood
Schneider, Jens
Hadwiger, Markus
Magistretti, Pierre J.
Househ, Mowafa
Calı, Corrado
author_facet Shah, Uzair
Agus, Marco
Boges, Daniya
Chiappini, Vanessa
Alzubaidi, Mahmood
Schneider, Jens
Hadwiger, Markus
Magistretti, Pierre J.
Househ, Mowafa
Calı, Corrado
contents We present SAM4EM, a novel approach for 3D segmentation of complex neural structures in electron microscopy (EM) data by leveraging the Segment Anything Model (SAM) alongside advanced fine-tuning strategies. Our contributions include the development of a prompt-free adapter for SAM using two stage mask decoding to automatically generate prompt embeddings, a dual-stage fine-tuning method based on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for enhancing segmentation with limited annotated data, and a 3D memory attention mechanism to ensure segmentation consistency across 3D stacks. We further release a unique benchmark dataset for the segmentation of astrocytic processes and synapses. We evaluated our method on challenging neuroscience segmentation benchmarks, specifically targeting mitochondria, glia, and synapses, with significant accuracy improvements over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, including recent SAM-based adapters developed for the medical domain and other vision transformer-based approaches. Experimental results indicate that our approach outperforms existing solutions in the segmentation of complex processes like glia and post-synaptic densities. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Uzshah/SAM4EM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_21544
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SAM4EM: Efficient memory-based two stage prompt-free segment anything model adapter for complex 3D neuroscience electron microscopy stacks
Shah, Uzair
Agus, Marco
Boges, Daniya
Chiappini, Vanessa
Alzubaidi, Mahmood
Schneider, Jens
Hadwiger, Markus
Magistretti, Pierre J.
Househ, Mowafa
Calı, Corrado
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We present SAM4EM, a novel approach for 3D segmentation of complex neural structures in electron microscopy (EM) data by leveraging the Segment Anything Model (SAM) alongside advanced fine-tuning strategies. Our contributions include the development of a prompt-free adapter for SAM using two stage mask decoding to automatically generate prompt embeddings, a dual-stage fine-tuning method based on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for enhancing segmentation with limited annotated data, and a 3D memory attention mechanism to ensure segmentation consistency across 3D stacks. We further release a unique benchmark dataset for the segmentation of astrocytic processes and synapses. We evaluated our method on challenging neuroscience segmentation benchmarks, specifically targeting mitochondria, glia, and synapses, with significant accuracy improvements over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, including recent SAM-based adapters developed for the medical domain and other vision transformer-based approaches. Experimental results indicate that our approach outperforms existing solutions in the segmentation of complex processes like glia and post-synaptic densities. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Uzshah/SAM4EM.
title SAM4EM: Efficient memory-based two stage prompt-free segment anything model adapter for complex 3D neuroscience electron microscopy stacks
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21544