Deep learning-based prediction of the retinal structural alterations after epiretinal membrane surgery

To generate and evaluate synthesized postoperative OCT images of epiretinal membrane (ERM) based on preoperative OCT images using deep learning methodology. This study included a total 500 pairs of preoperative and postoperative optical coherence tomography (OCT) images for training a neural network. 60 preoperative OCT images were used to test the neural networks performance, and the corresponding postoperative OCT images were used to evaluate the synthesized images in terms of structural similarity index measure (SSIM). The SSIM was used to quantify how similar the synthesized postoperative OCT image was to the actual postoperative OCT image. The Pix2Pix GAN model was used to generate synthesized postoperative OCT images. Total 60 synthesized OCT images were generated with training values at 800 epochs. The mean SSIM of synthesized postoperative OCT to the actual postoperative OCT was 0.913. Pix2Pix GAN model has a possibility to generate predictive postoperative OCT images following ERM removal surgery.