Robust deep learning method for choroidal vessel segmentation on swept source optical coherence tomography images

Accurate choroidal vessel segmentation with swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT) images provide unprecedented quantitative analysis towards the understanding of choroid-related diseases. Motivated by the leading segmentation performance in medical images from the use of deep learning methods, in this study, we proposed the adoption of a deep learning method, RefineNet, to segment the choroidal vessels from SS-OCT images. We quantitatively evaluated the RefineNet on 40 SS-OCT images consisting of ~3,900 manually annotated choroidal vessels regions. We achieved a segmentation agreement (SA) of 0.840 ± 0.035 with clinician 1 (C1) and 0.823 ± 0.027 with clinician 2 (C2). These results were higher than inter-observer variability measure in SA between C1 and C2 of 0.821 ± 0.037. Our results demonstrated that the choroidal vessels from SS-OCT can be automatically segmented using a deep learning method and thus provided a new approach towards an objective and reproducible quantitative analysis of vessel regions.