CTS-Net: A Segmentation Network for Glaucoma Optical Coherence Tomography Retinal Layer Images

Abstract

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) technology is essential to obtain glaucoma diagnostic data non-invasively and rapidly. Early diagnosis of glaucoma can be achieved by analyzing the thickness and shape of retinal layers. Accurate retinal layer segmentation assists ophthalmologists in improving the efficiency of disease diagnosis. Deep learning technology is one of the most effective methods for processing OCT retinal layer images, which can segment different retinal layers and effectively obtain the topological structure of the boundary. This paper proposes a neural network method for retinal layer segmentation based on the CSWin Transformer (CTS-Net), which can achieve pixel-level segmentation and obtain smooth boundaries. A Dice loss function based on boundary areas (BADice Loss) is proposed to make CTS-Net learn more features of edge regions and improve the accuracy of boundary segmentation. We applied the model to the publicly available dataset of glaucoma retina, and the test results showed that mean absolute distance (MAD), root mean square error (RMSE), and dice-similarity coefficient (DSC) metrics were 1.79 pixels, 2.15 pixels, and 92.79%, respectively, which are better than those of the compared model. In the cross-validation experiment, the ranges of MAD, RMSE, and DSC are 0.05 pixels, 0.03 pixels, and 0.33%, respectively, with a slight difference, which further verifies the generalization ability of CTS-Net.

Keywords

• glaucoma
• deep learning
• loss function
• retinal layer segmentation
• optical coherence tomography