3D Vessel Reconstruction in OCT-Angiography via Depth Map Estimation
This addresses the loss of 3D spatial information in clinical OCTA analysis for eye and systemic diseases, but it is incremental as it builds on existing depth estimation and segmentation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of reconstructing 3D blood vessels from 2D OCTA images by estimating depth maps, achieving effective depth prediction and 3D reconstruction as demonstrated experimentally.
Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) has been increasingly used in the management of eye and systemic diseases in recent years. Manual or automatic analysis of blood vessel in 2D OCTA images (en face angiograms) is commonly used in clinical practice, however it may lose rich 3D spatial distribution information of blood vessels or capillaries that are useful for clinical decision-making. In this paper, we introduce a novel 3D vessel reconstruction framework based on the estimation of vessel depth maps from OCTA images. First, we design a network with structural constraints to predict the depth of blood vessels in OCTA images. In order to promote the accuracy of the predicted depth map at both the overall structure- and pixel- level, we combine MSE and SSIM loss as the training loss function. Finally, the 3D vessel reconstruction is achieved by utilizing the estimated depth map and 2D vessel segmentation results. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective in the depth prediction and 3D vessel reconstruction for OCTA images.% results may be used to guide subsequent vascular analysis