Retinal layer segmentation in optical coherence tomography (OCT) using a 3D deep-convolutional regression network for patients with age-related macular degeneration

Introduction - Retinal layer segmentation in optical coherence tomography (OCT) images is an important approach for detecting and prognosing disease. Automating segmentation using robust machine learning techniques lead to computationally efficient solutions and significantly reduces the cost of labor-intensive labeling, which is traditionally performed by trained graders at a reading center, sometimes aided by semi-automated algorithms. Although several algorithms have been proposed since the revival of deep learning, eyes with severe pathological conditions continue to challenge fully automated segmentation approaches. There remains an opportunity to leverage the underlying spatial correlations between the retinal surfaces in the segmentation approach. Methods - Some of these proposed traditional methods can be expanded to utilize the three-dimensional spatial context governing the retinal image volumes by replacing the use of 2D filters with 3D filters. Towards this purpose, we propose a spatial-context, continuity and anatomical relationship preserving semantic segmentation algorithm, which utilizes the 3D spatial context from the image volumes with the use of 3D filters. We propose a 3D deep neural network capable of learning the surface positions of the layers in the retinal volumes. Results - We utilize a dataset of OCT images from patients with Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) to assess performance of our model and provide both qualitative (including segmentation maps and thickness maps) and quantitative (including error metric comparisons and volumetric comparisons) results, which demonstrate that our proposed method performs favorably even for eyes with pathological changes caused by severe retinal diseases. The Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) for patients with a wide range of AMD severity scores (0-11) were within 0.84 +/- 0.41 and 1.33 +/- 0.73 pixels, respectively, which are significantly better than some of the other state-of-the-art algorithms. Conclusion - The results demonstrate the utility of extracting features from the entire OCT volume by treating the volume as a correlated entity and show the benefit of utilizing 3D autoencoder based regression networks for smoothing the approximated retinal layers by inducing shape based regularization constraints.

Automated summary

Retinal layer segmentation in OCT images is an important method for disease detection and prognosis. This study proposes a semantic segmentation algorithm that utilizes the 3D spatial context from image volumes, achieving favorable results even for eyes with severe retinal diseases. The proposed method outperforms some state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of error metrics.