OCTAve: 2D en face optical coherence tomography angiography vessel segmentation in weakly-supervised learning with locality augmentation

Abstract

Objective: While the microvasculature annotation within Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) can be leveraged using deep-learning techniques, expensive annotation processes are required to create sufficient training data. One way to avoid the expensive annotation is to use a type of weak annotation in which only the center of the vessel is annotated. However, retaining the final segmentation quality with roughly annotated data remains a challenge. Methods: Our proposed methods, called OCTAve, provide a new way of using weak-annotation for microvasculature segmentation. Since the centerline labels are similar to scribble annotations, we attempted to solve this problem by using the scribble-based weakly-supervised learning method. Even though the initial results look promising, we found that the method could be significantly improved by adding our novel self-supervised deep supervision method based on Kullback-Liebler divergence. Results: The study on large public datasets with different annotation styles (i.e., ROSE, OCTA-500) demonstrates that our proposed method gives better quantitative and qualitative results than the baseline methods and a naive approach, with a p-value less than 0.001 on dice’s coefficient and a lot fewer artifacts. Conclusion: The segmentation results are both qualitatively and quantitatively superior to baseline weakly-supervised methods when using scribble-based weakly-supervised learning augmented with self-supervised deep supervision, with an average drop in segmentation performance of less than 10%. Significance: This work gives a new perspective on how weakly-supervised learning can be used to reduce the cost of annotating microvasculature, which can make the annotating process easier and reduce the amount of work for domain experts.