Parra-Mora Esther, da Silva Cruz Luís A
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, 3030-290, Portugal; Instituto de Telecomunicações, Coimbra, 3030-290, Portugal.
Comput Biol Med. 2022 Nov;150:106174. doi: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2022.106174. Epub 2022 Oct 4.
This article presents a novel end-to-end automatic solution for semantic segmentation of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. OCT is a non-invasive imaging technology widely used in clinical practice due to its ability to acquire high-resolution cross-sectional images of the ocular fundus. Due to the large variability of the retinal structures, OCT segmentation is usually carried out manually and requires expert knowledge. This study introduces a novel fully convolutional network (FCN) architecture designated by LOCTSeg, for end-to-end automatic segmentation of diagnostic markers in OCT b-scans. LOCTSeg is a lightweight deep FCN optimized for balancing performance and efficiency. Unlike state-of-the-art FCNs used in image segmentation, LOCTSeg achieves competitive inference speed without sacrificing segmentation accuracy. The proposed LOCTSeg is evaluated on two publicly available benchmarking datasets: (1) annotated retinal OCT image database (AROI) comprising 1136 images, and (2) healthy controls and multiple sclerosis lesions (HCMS) consisting of 1715 images. Moreover, we evaluated the proposed LOCTSeg with a private dataset of 250 OCT b-scans acquired from epiretinal membrane (ERM) and healthy patients. Results of the evaluation demonstrate empirically the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which improves the state-of-the-art Dice score from 69% to 73% and from 91% to 92% on AROI and HCMS datasets, respectively. Furthermore, LOCTSeg outperforms comparable lightweight FCNs' Dice score by margins between 4% and 15% on ERM segmentation.
本文提出了一种用于光学相干断层扫描(OCT)图像语义分割的新型端到端自动解决方案。OCT是一种非侵入性成像技术,因其能够获取眼底的高分辨率横截面图像而在临床实践中广泛应用。由于视网膜结构的巨大变异性,OCT分割通常需要人工进行且需要专业知识。本研究引入了一种名为LOCTSeg的新型全卷积网络(FCN)架构,用于对OCT B扫描中的诊断标记进行端到端自动分割。LOCTSeg是一种经过优化的轻量级深度FCN,用于平衡性能和效率。与图像分割中使用的最先进FCN不同,LOCTSeg在不牺牲分割精度的情况下实现了有竞争力的推理速度。所提出的LOCTSeg在两个公开可用的基准数据集上进行了评估:(1)包含1136张图像的注释视网膜OCT图像数据库(AROI),以及(2)由1715张图像组成的健康对照和多发性硬化病变(HCMS)。此外,我们使用从视网膜前膜(ERM)和健康患者获取的250张OCT B扫描的私有数据集对所提出的LOCTSeg进行了评估。评估结果通过实验证明了所提出算法的有效性,该算法在AROI和HCMS数据集上分别将最先进的Dice分数从69%提高到73%和从91%提高到92%。此外,在ERM分割方面,LOCTSeg的Dice分数比同类轻量级FCN高出4%至15%。