AI and the World's Hard Problems · Life sciences · Nature (machine learning) · 2026-10-11
ETSAM: effectively segmenting cell membranes in cryo-electron tomograms
Cell membranes are hard to distinguish in noisy cryo-electron tomography volumes. The authors present ETSAM, a two-stage method that fine-tunes the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) to segment membranes, trained on 83 experimental and 28 simulated tomograms. On 17 experimental test tomograms, it outperformed other deep learning methods with high sensitivity and better precision.