arXiv subjects

Liyang Fang

Publications and source records attributed to Liyang Fang.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2020

High signal-to-noise ratio reconstruction of low bit-depth optical coherence tomography using deep learning

Reducing the bit-depth is an effective approach to lower the cost of optical coherence tomography (OCT) systems and increase the transmission efficiency in data acquisition and telemedicine. However, a low bit-depth will lead to the degeneration of the detection sensitivity thus reduce the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of OCT images. In this paper, we propose to use deep learning for the reconstruction of the high SNR OCT images from the low bit-depth acquisition. Its feasibility was preliminarily evaluated by applying the proposed method to the quantized $3\sim8$-bit data from native 12-bit interference fringes. We employed a pixel-to-pixel generative adversarial network architecture in the low to high bit-depth OCT image transition. Retinal OCT data of a healthy subject from a homemade spectral-domain OCT system was used in the study. Extensively qualitative and quantitative results show this deep-learning-based approach could significantly improve the SNR of the low bit-depth OCT images especially at the choroidal region. Superior similarity and SNR between the reconstructed images and the original 12-bit OCT images could be derived when the bit-depth $\geq 5$. This work demonstrates the proper integration of OCT and deep learning could benefit the development of healthcare in low-resource settings.

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arXiv2020

Universal digital filtering for denoising volumetric retinal OCT and OCT angiography in 3D shearlet domain

Retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) and OCT angiography (OCTA) suffer from the degeneration of image quality due to speckle noise and bulk-motion noise, respectively. Because the cross-sectional retina has distinct features in OCT and OCTA B-scans, existing digital filters that can denoise OCT efficiently are unable to handle the bulk-motion noise in OCTA. In this Letter, we propose a universal digital filtering approach that is capable of minimizing both types of noise. Considering the retinal capillaries in OCTA are hard to differentiate in B-scans while having distinct curvilinear structures in 3D volumes, we decompose the volumetric OCT and OCTA data with 3D shearlets thus efficiently separate the retinal tissue and vessels from the noise in this transform domain. Compared with wavelets and curvelets, the shearlets provide better representation of the layer edges in OCT and the vasculature in OCTA. Qualitative and quantitative results show the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art OCT and OCTA denoising methods. Besides, the superiority of 3D denoising is demonstrated by comparing the 3D shearlet filtering with its 2D counterpart.

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arXiv2020

Digital resolution enhancement in low transverse sampling optical coherence tomography angiography using deep learning

Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) requires high transverse sampling density for visualizing retinal and choroidal capillaries. Low transverse sampling causes resolution degradation, such as the angiograms in wide-field OCTA. In this paper, we propose to address this problem using deep learning. We conducted extensive experiments on converting the centrally cropped 3 x 3 mm2 field of view (FOV) of the 8 x 8 mm2 foveal OCTA images (a sampling density of 22.9 $μ$m) to the native 3 x 3 mm2 en face OCTA images (a sampling density of 12.2 $μ$m). We employed a cycle-consistent adversarial network architecture in this conversion. The quantitative analysis using the perceptual similarity measures shows the generated OCTA images are closer to the native 3 x 3 mm2 scans. Besides, the results show the proposed method could also enhance signal-to-noise ratio. We further applied our method to enhance diseased cases and calculate vascular biomarkers, which demonstrates its generalization performance and clinical perspective.

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arXiv2019

Knowledge infused cascade convolutional neural network for segmenting retinal vessels in volumetric optical coherence tomography

We present a cascade deep neural network to segment retinal vessels in volumetric optical coherence tomography (OCT). Two types of knowledge are infused into the network for confining the searching regions. (1) Histology. The retinal vessels locate between the inner limiting membrane and the inner nuclear layer of human retina. (2) Imaging. The red blood cells inside the vessels scatter the OCT probe light forward and form projection shadows on the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) layer, which is avascular thus perfect for localizing the retinal vessel in transverse plane. Qualitative and quantitative comparison results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning and graph-based methods. This work demonstrates, instead of modifying the architectures of the deep networks, incorporating proper prior knowledge in the design of the image processing framework could be an efficient approach for handling such specific tasks.

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arXiv2019

The Channel Attention based Context Encoder Network for Inner Limiting Membrane Detection

The optic disc segmentation is an important step for retinal image-based disease diagnosis such as glaucoma. The inner limiting membrane (ILM) is the first boundary in the OCT, which can help to extract the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) through gradient edge information to locate the boundary of the optic disc. Thus, the ILM layer segmentation is of great importance for optic disc localization. In this paper, we build a new optic disc centered dataset from 20 volunteers and manually annotated the ILM boundary in each OCT scan as ground-truth. We also propose a channel attention based context encoder network modified from the CE-Net to segment the optic disc. It mainly contains three phases: the encoder module, the channel attention based context encoder module, and the decoder module. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art disc segmentation performance on our dataset mentioned above.

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