# aura-net : robust segmentation of phase-contrast microscopy images with few annotations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.01389 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01389/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [CE-Net: Context Encoder Network for 2D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02740/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ChAda-ViT : Channel Adaptive Attention for Joint Representation Learning of Heterogeneous Microscopy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15264/) (2023)
- [Concept-to-Pixel: Prompt-Free Universal Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17746/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present AURA-net, a convolutional neural network (CNN) for the segmentation of phase-contrast microscopy images. AURA-net uses transfer learning to accelerate training and Attention mechanisms to help the network focus on relevant image features. In this way, it can be trained efficiently with a very limited amount of annotations. Our network can thus be used to automate the segmentation of datasets that are generally considered too small for deep learning techniques. AURA-net also uses a loss inspired by active contours that is well-adapted to the specificity of phase-contrast images, further improving performance. We show that AURA-net outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in several small (less than 100images) datasets.