Mask Rearranging Data Augmentation for 3D Mitochondria Segmentation

3D mitochondria segmentation in electron microscopy (EM) images has achieved significant progress. However, existing learning-based methods with high performance typically rely on extensive training data with high-quality manual annotations, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this challenge, we propose a novel data augmentation method tailored for 3D mitochondria segmentation. First, we train a Mask2EM network for learning the mapping from the ground-truth instance masks to real 3D EM images in an adversarial manner. Based on the Mask2EM network, we can obtain synthetic 3D EM images from arbitrary instance masks to form a sufficient amount of paired training data for segmentation. Second, we design a 3D mask layout generator to generate diverse instance layouts by rearranging volumetric instance masks according to mitochondrial distance distribution. Experiments demonstrate that, as a plug-and-play module, the proposed method boosts existing 3D mitochondria segmentation networks to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Especially, the proposed method brings significant improvements when training data is extremely limited. Code will be available at: https://github.com/qic999/MRDA_MitoSeg.