A Deep-Learning Approach for Automated OCT En-Face Retinal Vessel Segmentation in Cases of Optic Disc Swelling Using...

In cases of optic disc swelling, segmentation of projected retinal blood vessels from optical coherence tomography (OCT) volumes is challenging due to swelling-based shadowing artifacts. Based on our hypothesis that simultaneously considering vessel information from multiple projected retinal layers can substantially increase vessel visibility, in this work, we propose a deep-learning-based approach to segment vessels involving the simultaneous use of three OCT en-face images as input.

A human expert vessel tracing combining information from OCT en-face images of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), inner retina, and total retina as well as a registered fundus image served as the reference standard. The deep neural network was trained from the imaging data from 18 patients with optic disc swelling to output a vessel probability map from three OCT en-face input images. The vessels from the OCT en-face images were also manually traced in three separate stages to compare with the performance of the proposed approach.

On an independent volume-matched test set of 18 patients, the proposed deep-learning-based approach outperformed the three OCT-based manual tracing stages. The manual tracing based on three OCT en-face images also outperformed the manual tracing using only the traditional RPE en-face image.

In cases of optic disc swelling, use of multiple en-face images enables better vessel segmentation when compared with the traditional use of a single en-face image.

Improved vessel segmentation approaches in cases of optic disc swelling can be used as features for an improved assessment of the severity and cause of the swelling.