Automated Region of Interest Selection Improves Deep Learning-Based Segmentation of Hyper-Reflective Foci in Optical Coherence Tomography Images

Hyperreflective foci (HRF) have been associated with retinal disease progression and demonstrated as a negative prognostic biomarker for visual function. Automated segmentation of HRF in retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans can be beneficial to identify the formation and movement of the HRF biomarker as a retinal disease progresses and can serve as the first step in understanding the nature and severity of the disease. In this paper, we propose a fully automated deep neural network based HRF segmentation model in OCT images. We enhance the model’s performance by using a patch-based strategy that increases the model’s compute on the HRF pixels. The patch-based strategy is evaluated against state of the art HRF segmentation pipelines on clinical retinal image data. Our results shows that the patch-based approach demonstrates a high precision score and intersection over union (IOU) using a ResNet34 segmentation model with Binary Cross Entropy loss function. The HRF segmentation pipeline can be used for analyzing HRF biomarkers for different retinopathies.