Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is an imaging modality that is used extensively for ophthalmic diagnosis, near-histological visualization and quantification of retinal abnormalities such as cysts, exudates, retinal layer disorganization, etc. Intra-retinal cysts (IRCs) occur in several macular disorders such as, diabetic macular edema, retinal vascular disorders, age-related macular degeneration, and inflammatory disorders. Automated segmentation of IRCs poses challenges owing to variations in the acquisition system scan intensities, speckle noise, and imaging artifacts. Several segmentation methods have been proposed in the literature for IRC segmentation on vendor-specific OCT images that lack generalizability across imaging systems. In this work, we propose a fully convolutional network (FCN) model for vendor-independent IRC segmentation. The proposed method counteracts image noise variabilities and trains FCN models on OCT sub-images from the OPTIMA cyst segmentation challenge dataset (with four different vendor-specific images, namely, Cirrus, Nidek, Spectralis, and Topcon). Further, optimal data augmentation and model hyper-parametrization is shown to prevent over-fitting for IRC area segmentation. The proposed method is evaluated on the test data set with a recall/precision rate of 0.66/0.79 across imaging vendors. The Dice correlation coefficient of the proposed method outperforms that of the published algorithms in the OPTIMA cyst segmentation challenge with a Dice rate of 0.71 across the vendors.

Retinal Fluids (fluid collections) develop because of the accumulation of fluid in the retina, which may be caused by several retinal disorders, and can lead to loss of vision. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides non-invasive cross-sectional images of the retina and enables the visualization of different retinal abnormalities. The identification and segmentation of retinal cysts from OCT scans is gaining immense attention since the manual analysis of OCT data is time consuming and requires an experienced ophthalmologist. Identification and categorization of the retinal cysts aids in establishing the pathophysiology of various retinal diseases, such as macular edema, diabetic macular edema, and age-related macular degeneration. Hence, an automatic algorithm for the segmentation and detection of retinal cysts would be of great value to the ophthalmologists. In this study, we have proposed a convolutional neural network-based deep ensemble architecture that can segment the three different types of retinal cysts from the retinal OCT images. The quantitative and qualitative performance of the model was evaluated using the publicly available RETOUCH challenge dataset. The proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art methods, with an overall improvement of 1.8%.

Development of an automated sub-retinal fluid segmentation technique from optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans is faced with challenges such as noise and motion artifacts present in OCT images, variation in size, shape and location of fluid pockets within the retina. The ability of a fully convolutional neural network to automatically learn significant low level features to differentiate subtle spatial variations makes it suitable for retinal fluid segmentation task. Hence, a fully convolutional neural network has been proposed in this work for the automatic segmentation of sub-retinal fluid in OCT scans of central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC) pathology. The proposed method has been evaluated on a dataset of 15 OCT volumes and an average Dice rate, Precision and Recall of 0.91, 0.93 and 0.89 respectively has been achieved over the test set.

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) has emerged as a major diagnostic modality for retinal imaging. Although OCT generates gross volumetric data, manual analysis of the images for locating or quantifying retinal cysts is a time consuming process. Recently semi- and fully-automatic methods for locating and segmenting retinal cysts have been proposed in the literature. Our paper proposes a fully automatic method for intra-retinal cyst segmentation using marker controlled watershed transform on B-scan images obtained on OCT scanning. Markers are obtained using k-means clustering and used as sources for topographical based watershed transform for final segmentation. Proposed method was evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively on Optima Cyst Challenge dataset against ground truth obtained from two graders. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed other recently proposed methods. Our algorithm achieved a recall rate of 82% while preserving precision rate of 77%, and gave a higher correlation rate of 96% with ground truth obtained from two graders.

Intra-retinal cysts (IRCs) are significant in detecting several ocular and retinal pathologies. Segmentation and quantification of IRCs from optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans is a challenging task due to present of speckle noise and scan intensity variations across the vendors. This work proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) model with an encoder-decoder pair architecture for IRC segmentation across different cross-vendor OCT scans. Since deep CNN models have high computational complexity due to a large number of parameters, the proposed method of depthwise separable convolutional filters aids model generalizability and prevents model over-fitting. Also, the swish activation function is employed to prevent the vanishing gradient problem. The optima cyst segmentation challenge (OCSC) dataset with four different vendor OCT device scans is used to evaluate the proposed model. Our model achieves a mean Dice score of 0.74 and mean recall/precision rate of 0.72/0.82 across different imaging vendors and it outperforms existing algorithms on the OCSC dataset.