A Novel Conditional Adversarial Diffusion Model for High-Fidelity OCT-to-OCT Image Translation and Precise Anti-VEGF Therapy Response Prediction in Diabetic Macular Edema
Diabetic macular edema (DME) is a leading cause of severe vision loss among working-age adults. Although intravitreal anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) injections currently serve as the first-line therapy for DME, a notable subset of patients fails to respond despite the substantial cost and clinical burden, suggesting they may benefit more from alternative interventions. Automated, noninvasive pre-treatment response assessment could therefore spare non-responders from the current trial-and-error treatment paradigm. In this study, we propose a novel conditional adversarial diffusion framework that synthesizes post-treatment optical coherence tomography (OCT) images from baseline scans, enabling the derivation of each patient's initial response to anti-VEGF therapy. The model was developed with subject-level 5-fold cross-validation on a US cohort (n = 127) and externally validated on an independent Iranian cohort (n = 44). Benchmarked against fourteen baseline and state-of-the-art translation models, the proposed model achieved the best treatment-response prediction performance among the methods evaluated for that task on both cohorts, with balanced accuracies of 85.7% and 93.0% on the US cohort and 85.2% and 95.3% on the external Iranian cohort at the 10% and 20% central subfield thickness reduction thresholds, respectively. Ultimately, this framework offers a decision-support tool to help ophthalmologists anticipate initial anti-VEGF outcomes in DME prior to treatment initiation, toward personalized therapy selection. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.