Data Efficiency and Transfer Robustness in Biomedical Image Segmentation: A Study of Redundancy and Forgetting with Cellpose
This study addresses two key challenges in applying Cellpose to biomedical image segmentation: data redundancy and catastrophic forgetting during cross-domain transfer. To tackle these, we propose a Data Quantization (DQ) strategy and a selective replay mechanism. Leveraging MAE embeddings and t-SNE analysis of the latent space, we identify that only 10% representative samples suffice to achieve performance saturation—significantly improving training efficiency and feature diversity. In multi-stage cross-domain transfer, replaying just 5–10% of source-domain data effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enables optimized domain transfer ordering. Extensive experiments on the Cyto dataset validate the efficacy of our approach; the code is publicly available. Our core contributions are: (i) the first systematic characterization of Cellpose’s data redundancy boundary, and (ii) a lightweight transfer learning paradigm that jointly optimizes data efficiency and knowledge retention.