Neural Networks Application for Accurate Retina Vessel Segmentation from OCT Fundus Reconstruction

Abstract

The use of neural networks for retinal vessel segmentation has gained significant attention in recent years. Most of the research related to the segmentation of retinal blood vessels is based on fundus images. In this study, we examine five neural network architectures to accurately segment vessels in fundus images reconstructed from 3D OCT scan data. OCT-based fundus reconstructions are of much lower quality compared to color fundus photographs due to noise and lower and disproportionate resolutions. The fundus image reconstruction process was performed based on the segmentation of the retinal layers in B-scans. Three reconstruction variants were proposed, which were then used in the process of detecting blood vessels using neural networks. We evaluated performance using a custom dataset of 24 3D OCT scans (with manual annotations performed by an ophthalmologist) using 6-fold cross-validation and demonstrated segmentation accuracy up to 98%. Our results indicate that the use of neural networks is a promising approach to segmenting the retinal vessel from a properly reconstructed fundus.