Open-source deep learning-based automatic segmentation of mouse Schlemm's canal in optical coherence tomography images

The purpose of this study was to develop an automatic deep learning-based approach and corresponding free, open-source software to perform segmentation of the Schlemm's canal (SC) lumen in optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans of living mouse eyes. A novel convolutional neural network (CNN) for semantic segmentation grounded in a U-Net architecture was developed by incorporating a late fusion scheme, multi-scale input image pyramid, dilated residual convolution blocks, and attention-gating. 163 pairs of intensity and speckle variance (SV) OCT B-scans acquired from 32 living mouse eyes were used for training, validation, and testing of this CNN model for segmentation of the SC lumen. The proposed model achieved a mean Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.694 ± 0.256 and median DSC of 0.791, while manual segmentation performed by a second expert grader achieved a mean and median DSC of 0.713 ± 0.209 and 0.763, respectively. This work presents the first automatic method for segmentation of the SC lumen in OCT images of living mouse eyes. The performance of the proposed model is comparable to the performance of a second human grader. Open-source automatic software for segmentation of the SC lumen is expected to accelerate experiments for studying treatment efficacy of new drugs affecting intraocular pressure and related diseases such as glaucoma, which present as changes in the SC area.