Learning to Segment Corneal Tissue Interfaces in OCT Images
This work addresses the need for accurate and generalizable corneal interface segmentation in medical imaging for anterior segment interventions, representing an incremental advance in deep learning applications.
The paper tackled the problem of segmenting corneal tissue interfaces in OCT images for surgical planning, presenting a CNN-based framework called CorNet that achieved errors 2x lower than non-proprietary state-of-the-art methods.
Accurate and repeatable delineation of corneal tissue interfaces is necessary for surgical planning during anterior segment interventions, such as Keratoplasty. Designing an approach to identify interfaces, which generalizes to datasets acquired from different Optical Coherence Tomographic (OCT) scanners, is paramount. In this paper, we present a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based framework called CorNet that can accurately segment three corneal interfaces across datasets obtained with different scan settings from different OCT scanners. Extensive validation of the approach was conducted across all imaged datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first deep learning based approach to segment both anterior and posterior corneal tissue interfaces. Our errors are 2x lower than non-proprietary state-of-the-art corneal tissue interface segmentation algorithms, which include image analysis-based and deep learning approaches.