Efficientand Robust Automated Segmentation of Nanoparticles and Aggregates from Transmission Electron Microscopy Images with Highly Complex Backgrounds

Morphologies of nanoparticles and aggregates play an important role in their properties for a range of applications. In particular, significant synthesis efforts have been directed toward controlling nanoparticle morphology and aggregation behavior in biomedical applications, as their size and shape have a significant impact on cellular uptake. Among several techniques for morphological characterization, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) can provide direct and accurate characterization of nanoparticle/aggregate morphology details. Nevertheless, manually analyzing a large number of TEM images is still a laborious process. Hence, there has been a surge of interest in employing machine learning methods to analyze nanoparticle size and shape. In order to achieve accurate nanoparticle analysis using machine learning methods, reliable and automated nanoparticle segmentation from TEM images is critical, especially when the nanoparticle image contrast is weak and the background is complex. These challenges are particularly pertinent in biomedical applications. In this work, we demonstrate an efficient, robust, and automated nanoparticle image segmentation method suitable for subsequent machine learning analysis. Our method is robust for noisy, low-electron-dose cryo-TEM images and for TEM cell images with complex, strong-contrast background features. Moreover, our method does not require any a priori training datasets, making it efficient and general. The ability to automatically, reliably, and efficiently segment nanoparticle/aggregate images is critical for advancing precise particle/aggregate control in biomedical applications.