Domain randomization for macromolecule structure classification and segmentation in electron cryo-tomograms

It is crucial to study and understand cellular processes. In recent years, Cellular Electron CryoTomography (CECT) serves as a powerful 3D imaging tool to visualize spatial structure of macromolecules inside the cell. However, it is challenging to analyze the macromolecular structures in a systematic way due to nature of the structural complexity of subcellular components. Existing computational and deep learning based approaches suffer from limited scalability, discrimination ability and lack of accurate annotated CECT data. Training with cheap simulated data can alleviate this problem while facing new challenges of bridging the ”reality gap” between synthetic training data and real testing data. In this paper, we tackle the tasks of macromolecule structure classification and segmentation in CECT images by adapting a simple but effective technique, domain randomization. We show that by combining deep neural models and domain randomization, we are able to achieve significant improvements of 35.21% and 46.34% in tasks of classification and semantic segmentation for real CECT data, comparing to the model trained only on synthetic data that aims to faithfully reproduce real-world data distribution.