Fast and Automated Hyperreflective Foci Segmentation Based on Image Enhancement and Improved 3D U-Net in SD-OCT Volumes with Diabetic Retinopathy

PURPOSE: To design a robust and automated hyperreflective foci (HRF) segmentation framework for spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) volumes, especially volumes with low HRF-background contrast. METHODS: HRF in retinal SD-OCT volumes appear with low-contrast characteristics that results in the difficulty of HRF segmentation. Therefore to effectively segment the HRF we proposed a fully automated method for HRF segmentation in SD-OCT volumes with diabetic retinopathy (DR). First, we generated the enhanced SD-OCT images from the denoised SD-OCT images with an enhancement method. Then the enhanced images were cascaded with the denoised images as the two-channel input to the network against the low-contrast HRF. Finally, we replaced the standard convolution with slice-wise dilated convolution in the last layer of the encoder path of 3D U-Net to obtain long-range information. RESULTS: We evaluated our method using two-fold cross-validation on 33 SD-OCT volumes from 27 patients. The average dice similarity coefficient was 70.73%, which was higher than that of the existing methods with significant difference (P < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method is faster and achieves more reliable segmentation results than the current HRF segmentation algorithms. We expect that this method will contribute to clinical diagnosis and disease surveillance. TRANSLATIONAL RELEVANCE: Our framework for the automated HRF segmentation of SD-OCT volumes may improve the clinical diagnosis of DR.