Towards Generalizability and Robustness in Biological Object Detection in Electron Microscopy Images

Machine learning approaches have the potential for meaningful impact in the biomedical field. However, there are often challenges unique to biomedical data that prohibits the adoption of these innovations. For example, limited data, data volatility, and data shifts all compromise model robustness and generalizability. Without proper tuning and data management, deploying machine learning models in the presence of unaccounted for corruptions leads to reduced or misleading performance. This study explores techniques to enhance model generalizability through iterative adjustments. Specifically, we investigate a detection tasks using electron microscopy images and compare models trained with different normalization and augmentation techniques. We found that models trained with Group Normalization or texture data augmentation outperform other normalization techniques and classical data augmentation, enabling them to learn more generalized features. These improvements persist even when models are trained and tested on disjoint datasets acquired through diverse data acquisition protocols. Results hold true for transformerand convolution-based detection architectures. The experiments show an impressive 29% boost in average precision, indicating significant enhancements in the models generalizibality. This underscores the models capacity to effectively adapt to diverse datasets and demonstrates their increased resilience in real-world applications.