Recurrent Self Fusion: Iterative Denoising for Consistent Retinal OCT Segmentation

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a valuable imaging technique in ophthalmology, providing high-resolution, cross-sectional images of the retina for early detection and monitoring of various retinal and neurological diseases. However, discrepancies in retinal layer thickness measurements among different OCT devices pose challenges for data comparison and interpretation, particularly in longitudinal analyses. This work introduces the idea of a recurrent self fusion (RSF) algorithm to address this issue. Our RSF algorithm, built upon the self fusion methodology, iteratively denoises retinal OCT images. A deep learning-based retinal OCT segmentation algorithm is employed for downstream analyses. A large dataset of paired OCT scans acquired on both a Spectralis and Cirrus OCT device are used for validation. The results demonstrate that the RSF algorithm effectively reduces speckle contrast and enhances the consistency of retinal OCT segmentation.