Cell segmentation is the foundation of a wide range of microscopy-based biological studies. Deep learning has revolutionized two-dimensional (2D) cell segmentation, enabling generalized solutions across cell types and imaging modalities. This has been driven by the ease of scaling up image acquisition, annotation and computation. However, three-dimensional (3D) cell segmentation, requiring dense annotation of 2D slices, still poses substantial challenges. Manual labeling of 3D cells to train broadly applicable segmentation models is prohibitive. Even in high-contrast images annotation is ambiguous and time-consuming. Here we develop a theory and toolbox, u-Segment3D, for 2D-to-3D segmentation, compatible with any 2D method generating pixel-based instance cell masks. u-Segment3D translates and enhances 2D instance segmentations to a 3D consensus instance segmentation without training data, as demonstrated on 11 real-life datasets, comprising >70,000 cells, spanning single cells, cell aggregates and tissue. Moreover, u-Segment3D is competitive with native 3D segmentation, even exceeding when cells are crowded and have complex morphologies. u-Segment3D is a universal framework that translates and enhances 2D instance segmentations to a 3D consensus instance segmentation without training data. It performs well across diverse datasets, including cells with complex morphologies.
Universal consensus 3D segmentation of cells from 2D segmented stacks
Felix Y. Zhou,Z. Marin,Clarence Yapp,Qiongjing Zou,B. Nanes,S. Daetwyler,Andrew R. Jamieson,Md Torikul Islam,Edward Jenkins,Gabriel M. Gihana,Jinlong Lin,Hazel M. Borges,Bo-Jui Chang,Andrew D. Weems,Sean J. Morrison,P. Sorger,R. Fiolka,Kevin M. Dean,G. Danuser
Published 2025 in Nature Methods
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- Publication year
2025
- Venue
Nature Methods
- Publication date
2025-11-01
- Fields of study
Biology, Medicine, Computer Science
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Semantic Scholar, PubMed
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