Point based weakly semi-supervised biomarker detection with cross-scale and label assignment in retinal OCT images

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is currently one of the most advanced retinal imaging methods. Retinal biomarkers in OCT images are of clinical significance and can assist ophthalmologists in diagnosing lesions. Compared with fundus images, OCT can provide higher resolution segmentation. However, image annotation at the bounding box level needs to be performed by ophthalmologists carefully and is difficult to obtain. In addition, the large variation in shape of different retinal markers and the inconspicuous appearance of biomarkers make it difficult for existing deep learning-based methods to effectively detect them. To overcome the above challenges, we propose a novel network for the detection of retinal biomarkers in OCT images.

We first address the issue of labeling cost using a novel weakly semi-supervised object detection method with point annotations which can reduce bounding box-level annotation efforts. To extend the method to the detection of biomarkers in OCT images, we propose multiple consistent regularizations for point-to-box regression network to deal with the shortage of supervision, which aims to learn more accurate regression mappings. Furthermore, in the subsequent fully supervised detection, we propose a cross-scale feature enhancement module to alleviate the detection problems caused by the large-scale variation of biomarkers. We also propose a dynamic label assignment strategy to distinguish samples of different importance more flexibly, thereby reducing detection errors due to the indistinguishable appearance of the biomarkers.

When using our detection network, our regressor also achieves an AP value of 20.83 s when utilizing a 5 % fully labeled dataset partition, surpassing the performance of other comparative methods at 5 % and 10 %. Even coming close to the 20.87 % result achieved by Point DETR under 20 % full labeling conditions. When using Group R-CNN as the point-to-box regressor, our detector achieves 27.21 % AP in the 50 % fully labeled dataset experiment. 7.42 % AP improvement is achieved compared to our detection network baseline Faster R-CNN.

The experimental findings not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with minimal bounding box annotations but also highlight the enhanced biomarker detection performance of the proposed module. We have included a detailed algorithmic flow in the supplementary material.