Automated segmentation of the ciliary muscle in OCT images using fully convolutional networks

Quantifying shape changes in the ciliary muscle during accommodation is essential in understanding the potential role of the ciliary muscle in presbyopia. The ciliary muscle can be imaged in-vivo using OCT but quantifying the ciliary muscle shape from these images has been challenging both due to the low contrast of the images at the apex of the ciliary muscle and the tedious work of segmenting the ciliary muscle shape. We present an automatic-segmentation tool for OCT images of the ciliary muscle using fully convolutional networks. A study using a dataset of 1,039 images shows that the trained fully convolutional network can successfully segment ciliary muscle images and quantify ciliary muscle thickness changes during accommodation. The study also shows that EfficientNet outperforms other current backbones of the literature.