Synthetic data enables human-grade microtubule analysis with foundation models for segmentation
Fig 7
Only SAM3Text + HPO reaches human segmentation performance on unseen, real IRM data.
Split violin plots show the distribution of per-image SKIoU scores (n = 66) for each method evaluated on unseen, real IRM data. The left side of each violin (blue) represents the default configurations, while the right side (purple) shows the performance after HPO on 10 random, synthetic synthetic images from SynthMT. Each violin includes a horizontal line indicating the mean SKIoU across all images. The human performance is shown as a solid gray violin for reference. Its mean and standard deviation values are indicated by horizontal lines across the plot. The plot shows that the optimized SAM3Text matches the human inter-annotator baseline. While other methods also improve with HPO, none demonstrates the top-tier performance of SAM3Text. Notably, CellSAM already approaches human-level performance in its default configuration, but exhibits decreased performance after HPO.