Localization of Anatomical Features in Vascular-enhanced Enface OCT Images

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) allows in vivo volumetric imaging of the eye. Identification and localization of anatomical features in enface OCT are important steps in OCT-based image analysis. However the visibility of anatomical features in both structural OCT or vascular OCT angiography is limited. In this paper, we propose to use vascular-enhanced enface OCT image for the concurrent detection of anatomical features, using a FasterRCNN object detection framework based on convolutional networks. Transfer learning was applied to adapt pre-trained models as the backbone networks. Models were evaluated on a dataset of 419 images. The results showed that VGG-FasterRCNN achieved a mean average precision 0.77, with localization errors of 0.18 ± 0.10 mm and 0.24 ± 0.13 mm for the macula and optic disc respectively. The results are promising and suggest that this network could potentially be used to automatically and concurrently detect anatomical features.Clinical Relevance- Localization of anatomical features in enface OCT is needed for the automation of OCT image analysis protocols. The use of fast detection networks could potentially suggest image-based real-time tracking during image acquisition.