Abstract
Cellular Electron Cryo Tomography (CECT) 3D imaging has permitted biomedical community to study macromolecule structures inside single cells with deep learning approaches. Many deep learning-based methods have since been developed to classify macromolecule structures from tomograms with high accuracy. However, several recent studies have demonstrated the lack of robustness in these models against often-imperceptible, designed changes of input. Therefore, making existing subtomogram-classification models robust remains a serious challenge. In this paper, we study the robustness of the state-of-the-art subtomogram classifier on CECT images and propose a method called Regularized Adversarial Training (RAT) to defend the classifier against a wide range of designed threats. Our results show that RAT improves robustness for CECT image classification over the previous methods.