CVJan 23, 2019

U2-Net: A Bayesian U-Net model with epistemic uncertainty feedback for photoreceptor layer segmentation in pathological OCT scans

arXiv:1901.07929v266 citations
AI Analysis

This addresses segmentation challenges in medical imaging for ophthalmology, specifically for pathological OCT analysis, though it appears incremental as it builds on U-Net with Bayesian uncertainty estimation.

The paper tackles photoreceptor layer segmentation in pathological OCT scans by introducing a Bayesian U-Net model that provides accurate segmentations and pixel-wise epistemic uncertainty maps. The result shows improved performance over baseline U-Net in terms of Dice index and area under the precision/recall curve on OCT scans of patients with age-related macular degeneration, retinal vein occlusion, and diabetic macular edema.

In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian deep learning based model for segmenting the photoreceptor layer in pathological OCT scans. Our architecture provides accurate segmentations of the photoreceptor layer and produces pixel-wise epistemic uncertainty maps that highlight potential areas of pathologies or segmentation errors. We empirically evaluated this approach in two sets of pathological OCT scans of patients with age-related macular degeneration, retinal vein oclussion and diabetic macular edema, improving the performance of the baseline U-Net both in terms of the Dice index and the area under the precision/recall curve. We also observed that the uncertainty estimates were inversely correlated with the model performance, underlying its utility for highlighting areas where manual inspection/correction might be needed.

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