Microvasculature Segmentation and Inter-capillary Area Quantification of the Deep Vascular Complex using Transfer Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCT-A) permits visualization of the changes to the retinal circulation due to diabetic retinopathy (DR), a microvascular complication of diabetes. We demonstrate accurate segmentation of the vascular morphology for the superficial capillary plexus and deep vascular complex (SCP and DVC) using a convolutional neural network (CNN) for quantitative analysis. Methods: Retinal OCT-A with a 6x6mm field of view (FOV) were acquired using a Zeiss PlexElite. Multiple-volume acquisition and averaging enhanced the vessel network contrast used for training the CNN. We used transfer learning from a CNN trained on 76 images from smaller FOVs of the SCP acquired using different OCT systems. Quantitative analysis of perfusion was performed on the automated vessel segmentations in representative patients with DR. Results: The automated segmentations of the OCT-A images maintained the hierarchical branching and lobular morphologies of the SCP and DVC, respectively. The network segmented the SCP with an accuracy of 0.8599, and a Dice index of 0.8618. For the DVC, the accuracy was 0.7986, and the Dice index was 0.8139. The inter-rater comparisons for the SCP had an accuracy and Dice index of 0.8300 and 0.6700, respectively, and 0.6874 and 0.7416 for the DVC. Conclusions: Transfer learning reduces the amount of manually-annotated images required, while producing high quality automatic segmentations of the SCP and DVC. Using high quality training data preserves the characteristic appearance of the capillary networks in each layer. Translational Relevance: Accurate retinal microvasculature segmentation with the CNN results in improved perfusion analysis in diabetic retinopathy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".