Author:
Vigueras-Guillén Juan P.,van Rooij Jeroen,van Dooren Bart T. H.,Lemij Hans G.,Islamaj Esma,van Vliet Lucas J.,Vermeer Koenraad A.
Abstract
AbstractCorneal guttae, which are the abnormal growth of extracellular matrix in the corneal endothelium, are observed in specular images as black droplets that occlude the endothelial cells. To estimate the corneal parameters (endothelial cell density [ECD], coefficient of variation [CV], and hexagonality [HEX]), we propose a new deep learning method that includes a novel attention mechanism (named fNLA), which helps to infer the cell edges in the occluded areas. The approach first derives the cell edges, then infers the well-detected cells, and finally employs a postprocessing method to fix mistakes. This results in a binary segmentation from which the corneal parameters are estimated. We analyzed 1203 images (500 contained guttae) obtained with a Topcon SP-1P microscope. To generate the ground truth, we performed manual segmentation in all images. Several networks were evaluated (UNet, ResUNeXt, DenseUNets, UNet++, etc.) and we found that DenseUNets with fNLA provided the lowest error: a mean absolute error of 23.16 [cells/mm$$^{2}$$
2
] in ECD, 1.28 [%] in CV, and 3.13 [%] in HEX. Compared with Topcon’s built-in software, our error was 3–6 times smaller. Overall, our approach handled notably well the cells affected by guttae, detecting cell edges partially occluded by small guttae and discarding large areas covered by extensive guttae.
Funder
Combined Ophthalmic Research Rotterdam
Dutch Organization for Health Research and Healthcare Innovation
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Reference48 articles.
1. Elhalis, H., Azizi, B. & Jurkunas, U. V. Fuchs endothelial corneal dystrophy. Ocul. Surf. 8(4), 173–184 (2010).
2. McLaren, J. W., Bachman, L. A., Kane, K. M. & Patel, S. V. Objective assessment of the corneal endothelium in Fuchs’ endothelial dystrophy. Investig. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci. 55(2), 1184–1190 (2014).
3. Gain, P. et al. Global survey of corneal transplantation and eye banking. JAMA Ophthalmol. 134(2), 167–176 (2016).
4. Adamis, A. P., Filatov, V., Tripathi, B. J. & Tripathi, R. C. Fuchs’ endothelial dystrophy of the cornea. Surv. Ophthalmol. 38(2), 149–168 (1993).
5. Moshirfar, M., Somani, A. N., Vaidyanathan, U. & Patel, B. C. Fuchs Endothelial Dystrophy. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK545248/ (StatPearls Publishing, 2021).
Cited by
10 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献