Elastic Deformation of Optical Coherence Tomography Images of Diabetic Macular Edema for Deep-Learning Models Training: How Far to Go?

Unlabelled: - Objective: To explore the clinical validity of elastic deformation of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images for data augmentation in the development of deep-learning model for detection of diabetic macular edema (DME).

Methods: Prospective evaluation of OCT images of DME (n = 320) subject to elastic transformation, with the deformation intensity represented by ([Formula: see text]). Three sets of images, each comprising 100 pairs of scans (100 original & 100 modified), were grouped according to the range of ([Formula: see text]), including low-, medium- and high-degree of augmentation; ([Formula: see text] = 1-6), ([Formula: see text] = 7-12), and ([Formula: see text] = 13-18), respectively.