Three-dimensional diabetic macular edema thickness maps based on fluid segmentation and fovea detection using deep learning.

AIM

To explore a more accurate quantifying diagnosis method of diabetic macular edema (DME) by displaying detailed 3D morphometry beyond the gold-standard quantification indicator-central retinal thickness (CRT) and apply it in follow-up of DME patients.

METHODS

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans of 229 eyes from 160 patients were collected. We manually annotated cystoid macular edema (CME), subretinal fluid (SRF) and fovea as ground truths. Deep convolution neural networks (DCNNs) were constructed including U-Net, sASPP, HRNetV2-W48, and HRNetV2-W48+Object-Contextual Representation (OCR) for fluid (CME+SRF) segmentation and fovea detection respectively, based on which the thickness maps of CME, SRF and retina were generated and divided by Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) grid.

RESULTS

In fluid segmentation, with the best DCNN constructed and loss function, the dice similarity coefficients (DSC) of segmentation reached 0.78 (CME), 0.82 (SRF), and 0.95 (retina). In fovea detection, the average deviation between the predicted fovea and the ground truth reached 145.7±117.8 µm. The generated macular edema thickness maps are able to discover center-involved DME by intuitive morphometry and fluid volume, which is ignored by the traditional definition of CRT>250 µm. Thickness maps could also help to discover fluid above or below the fovea center ignored or underestimated by a single OCT B-scan.

CONCLUSION

Compared to the traditional unidimensional indicator-CRT, 3D macular edema thickness maps are able to display more intuitive morphometry and detailed statistics of DME, supporting more accurate diagnoses and follow-up of DME patients.