1.
Hyper-reflective foci segmentation in SD-OCT retinal images with diabetic retinopathy using deep convolutional neural networks.
Yu, C, Xie, S, Niu, S, Ji, Z, Fan, W, Yuan, S, Liu, Q, Chen, Q
Medical physics. 2019;(10):4502-4519
Abstract
PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to automatically and accurately segment hyper-reflective foci (HRF) in spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) images with diabetic retinopathy (DR) using deep convolutional neural networks. METHODS An automatic HRF segmentation model for SD-OCT images based on deep networks was constructed. The model segmented small lesions through pixel-wise predictions based on small image patches. We used an approach for discriminative features extraction for small patches by introducing small kernels and strides in convolutional and pooling layers, which was applied on the state-of-the-art deep classification networks (GoogLeNet and ResNet). The features extracted by the adapted deep networks were fed into a softmax layer to produce the probabilities of HRF. We trained different models on a dataset with 16 HRF eyes by using different sizes of patches, and then, we fused these models to generate optimal results. RESULTS Experimental results on 18 eyes demonstrated that our method is effective for the HRF segmentation. The dice similarity coefficient (DSC) for the foci area in B-scan, projection images, and foci amount in B-scan images reaches 67.81%, 74.09%, and 72.45%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS The proposed segmentation model can accurately segment HRF in SD-OCT images with DR and outperforms traditional methods. Our model may provide reliable segmentations for small lesions in SD-OCT images and may be helpful in the clinical diagnosis of diseases.
2.
Choroidal vasculature characteristics based choroid segmentation for enhanced depth imaging optical coherence tomography images.
Chen, Q, Niu, S, Yuan, S, Fan, W, Liu, Q
Medical physics. 2016;(4):1649
Abstract
PURPOSE In clinical research, it is important to measure choroidal thickness when eyes are affected by various diseases. The main purpose is to automatically segment choroid for enhanced depth imaging optical coherence tomography (EDI-OCT) images with five B-scans averaging. METHODS The authors present an automated choroid segmentation method based on choroidal vasculature characteristics for EDI-OCT images with five B-scans averaging. By considering the large vascular of the Haller's layer neighbor with the choroid-sclera junction (CSJ), the authors measured the intensity ascending distance and a maximum intensity image in the axial direction from a smoothed and normalized EDI-OCT image. Then, based on generated choroidal vessel image, the authors constructed the CSJ cost and constrain the CSJ search neighborhood. Finally, graph search with smooth constraints was utilized to obtain the CSJ boundary. RESULTS Experimental results with 49 images from 10 eyes in 8 normal persons and 270 images from 57 eyes in 44 patients with several stages of diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately segment the choroid of EDI-OCT images with five B-scans averaging. The mean choroid thickness difference and overlap ratio between the authors' proposed method and manual segmentation drawn by experts were -11.43 μm and 86.29%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Good performance was achieved for normal and pathologic eyes, which proves that the authors' method is effective for the automated choroid segmentation of the EDI-OCT images with five B-scans averaging.