Deep learning based automated extraction of intra-retinal layers for analyzing retinal abnormalities

Abstract

Extraction of retinal layers from optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans is critical for analyzing retinal anomalies and manual segmentation of these retinal layers is a very cumbersome task. Recently, deep learning has gained much popularity in medical image analysis due to its underlying precision and robustness. Many researchers have utilized deep learning for extracting retinal layers from OCT images. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no literature available that presents a robust segmentation framework that is able to extract retinal layers from OCT scans having different retinal pathological syndromes. Therefore, this paper presents a deep convolutional neural network and structure tensor-based segmentation framework (CNN-STSF) for the fully automated segmentation of up to eight retinal layers from normal as well as diseased OCT scans. First of all, the proposed framework computes coherent tensor from the candidate scan through which retinal layers are extracted. Afterwards, the pixels representing the layers are further classified using cloud based deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model trained on 1,200 retinal layers patches. CNN model in the proposed framework computes the probability of each layer pixels and assign it to be part of that layer for which it has the highest probability. The proposed framework was tested and validated on more than 39,000 retinal OCT scans from different publicly available datasets and from local Armed Forces Institute of Ophthalmology (AFIO) dataset where it outperformed all the existing solutions by achieving the overall layer segmentation accuracy of 0.9375. Keywords: Retina, Tensile stress, Convolution, Image segmentation, Pathology, Computational modeling, Blindness