Inpainting Saturation Artifact in Anterior Segment Optical Coherence Tomography

The cornea is an important refractive structure in the human eye. The corneal segmentation technique provides valuable information for clinical diagnoses, such as corneal thickness. Non-contact anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT) is a prevalent ophthalmic imaging technique that can visualize the anterior and posterior surfaces of the cornea. Nonetheless, during the imaging process, saturation artifacts are commonly generated due to the tangent of the corneal surface at that point, which is normal to the incident light source. This stripe-shaped saturation artifact covers the corneal surface, causing blurring of the corneal edge, reducing the accuracy of corneal segmentation. To settle this matter, an inpainting method that introduces structural similarity and frequency loss is proposed to remove the saturation artifact in AS-OCT images. Specifically, the structural similarity loss reconstructs the corneal structure and restores corneal textural details. The frequency loss combines the spatial domain with the frequency domain to ensure the overall consistency of the image in both domains. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed method in corneal segmentation tasks is evaluated, and the results indicate a significant benefit for subsequent clinical analysis.