An end-to-end network for segmenting the vasculature of three retinal capillary plexuses from OCT angiographic volumes

YUKUN GUO, TRISTAN T. HORMEL, SHAOHUA PI, XIANG WEI, MIN GAO, JOHN C. MORRISON, YALI JIA

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

The segmentation of en face retinal capillary angiograms from volumetric optical coherence tomographic angiography (OCTA) usually relies on retinal layer segmentation, which is time-consuming and error-prone. In this study, we developed a deep-learning-based method to segment vessels in the superficial vascular plexus (SVP), intermediate capillary plexus (ICP), and deep capillary plexus (DCP) directly from volumetric OCTA data. The method contains a three-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) for extracting distinct retinal layers, a custom projection module to generate three vascular plexuses from OCTA data, and three parallel CNNs to segment vasculature. Experimental results on OCTA data from rat eyes demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed method. This end-to-end network has the potential to simplify OCTA data processing on retinal vasculature segmentation. The main contribution of this study is that we propose a custom projection module to connect retinal layer segmentation and vasculature segmentation modules and automatically convert data from three to two dimensions, thus establishing an end-to-end method to segment three retinal capillary plexuses from volumetric OCTA without any human intervention.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)4889-4900
Number of pages12
JournalBiomedical Optics Express
Volume12
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 1 2021

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Biotechnology
  • Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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