Scellseg: a style-aware cell instance segmentation tool with pre-training and contrastive fine-tuning
Deep learning-based cell segmentation is increasingly utilized in cell biology and molecular pathology, due to massive accumulation of diverse large-scale datasets and excellent performance in cell representation. However, the development of specialized algorithms has long been hampered by a paucity of annotated training data, whereas the performance of generalist algorithm was limited without experiment-specific calibration. Here, we present a deep learning-based tool called Scellseg consisted of novel pre-trained network architecture and contrastive fine-tuning strategy. In comparison to four commonly used algorithms, Scellseg outperformed in average precision on three diverse datasets with no need for dataset-specific configuration. Interestingly, we found that eight images are sufficient for model tuning to achieve satisfied performance based on a shot data scale experiment. We also developed a graphical user interface integrated with functions of annotation, fine-tuning and inference, that allows biologists to easily specialize their own segmentation model and analyze data at the single-cell level.