Learn Single-horizon Disease Evolution for Predictive Generation of Post-therapeutic Neovascular Age-related Macular Degeneration
This work addresses the need for image-to-image predictions in ophthalmology to help forecast therapeutic effects for nAMD patients, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing generative methods.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting post-therapeutic SD-OCT images for neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) by proposing SHENet, a single-horizon disease evolution network that generates images with the highest quality and best structure protection compared to other methods, validated on 383 SD-OCT cubes from 22 patients.
Most of the existing disease prediction methods in the field of medical image processing fall into two classes, namely image-to-category predictions and image-to-parameter predictions. Few works have focused on image-to-image predictions. Different from multi-horizon predictions in other fields, ophthalmologists prefer to show more confidence in single-horizon predictions due to the low tolerance of predictive risk. We propose a single-horizon disease evolution network (SHENet) to predictively generate post-therapeutic SD-OCT images by inputting pre-therapeutic SD-OCT images with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD). In SHENet, a feature encoder converts the input SD-OCT images to deep features, then a graph evolution module predicts the process of disease evolution in high-dimensional latent space and outputs the predicted deep features, and lastly, feature decoder recovers the predicted deep features to SD-OCT images. We further propose an evolution reinforcement module to ensure the effectiveness of disease evolution learning and obtain realistic SD-OCT images by adversarial training. SHENet is validated on 383 SD-OCT cubes of 22 nAMD patients based on three well-designed schemes based on the quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Compared with other generative methods, the generative SD-OCT images of SHENet have the highest image quality. Besides, SHENet achieves the best structure protection and content prediction. Qualitative evaluations also demonstrate that SHENet has a better visual effect than other methods. SHENet can generate post-therapeutic SD-OCT images with both high prediction performance and good image quality, which has great potential to help ophthalmologists forecast the therapeutic effect of nAMD.