Retinal Layer Segmentation Reformulated as OCT Language Processing

Tran A, Weiss J, Albarqouni S, Faghi Roohi S, Navab N (2020)


Publication Type: Conference contribution

Publication year: 2020

Journal

Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH

Book Volume: 12265 LNCS

Pages Range: 694-703

Conference Proceedings Title: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Event location: Lima, PER

ISBN: 9783030597214

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-59722-1_67

Abstract

In the medical field, semantic segmentation has recently been dominated by deep-learning based image processing methods. Convolutional Neural Network approaches analyze image patches, draw complex features and latent representations and take advantage of these to label image pixels and voxels. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for segmentation of OCT images, in which the intensity of elements of each A-mode depend on the path projected light takes through anatomical tissues to reach that point. The idea of this work is to reformulate this sequential voxel labeling/segmentation problem as language processing. Instead of treating images as patches, we regard them as a set of pixel column sequences and thus tackle the task of image segmentation, in this case pixel sequence labeling, as a natural language processing alike problem. Anatomical consistency, i.e. expected sequence of voxels representing retinal layers of eye’s anatomy along each OCT ray, serves as a fixed and learnable grammar. We show the effectiveness of this approach on a layer segmentation task for retinal Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) data. Due to the inherent directionality of the modality, certain properties and artifacts such as varying signal strength and shadowing form a consistent pattern along increasing imaging depth. The retinal layer structure lends itself to our approach due to the fixed order of layers along the imaging direction. We investigate the influence of different model choices including simple RNNS, LSTMs and GRU structures on the outcome of this layer segmentation approach. Experimental results show that the potential of this idea that is on par with state of the art works while being flexible to changes in the data structure.

Involved external institutions

How to cite

APA:

Tran, A., Weiss, J., Albarqouni, S., Faghi Roohi, S., & Navab, N. (2020). Retinal Layer Segmentation Reformulated as OCT Language Processing. In Anne L. Martel, Purang Abolmaesumi, Danail Stoyanov, Diana Mateus, Maria A. Zuluaga, S. Kevin Zhou, Daniel Racoceanu, Leo Joskowicz (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (pp. 694-703). Lima, PER: Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH.

MLA:

Tran, Arianne, et al. "Retinal Layer Segmentation Reformulated as OCT Language Processing." Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2020, Lima, PER Ed. Anne L. Martel, Purang Abolmaesumi, Danail Stoyanov, Diana Mateus, Maria A. Zuluaga, S. Kevin Zhou, Daniel Racoceanu, Leo Joskowicz, Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH, 2020. 694-703.

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