Automated Quantification of Pathological Fluids in Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration, and Its Repeatability Using Deep Learning.

Purpose: To develop a reliable algorithm for the automated identification, localization, and volume measurement of exudative manifestations in neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD), including intraretinal (IRF), subretinal fluid (SRF), and pigment epithelium detachment (PED), using a deep-learning approach.

Methods: One hundred seven spectral domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) cube volumes were extracted from nAMD eyes. Manual annotation of IRF, SRF, and PED was performed. Ninety-two OCT volumes served as training and validation set, and 15 OCT volumes from different patients as test set. The performance of our fluid segmentation method was quantified by means of pixel-wise metrics and volume correlations and compared to other methods. Repeatability was tested on 42 other eyes with five OCT volume scans acquired on the same day.

Results: The fully automated algorithm achieved good performance for the detection of IRF, SRF, and PED. The area under the curve for detection, sensitivity, and specificity was 0.97, 0.95, and 0.99, respectively. The correlation coefficients for the fluid volumes were 0.99, 0.99, and 0.91, respectively. The Dice score was 0.73, 0.67, and 0.82, respectively. For the largest volume quartiles the Dice scores were >0.90. Including retinal layer segmentation contributed positively to the performance. The repeatability of volume prediction showed a standard deviations of 4.0 nL, 3.5 nL, and 20.0 nL for IRF, SRF, and PED, respectively.

Conclusions: The deep-learning algorithm can simultaneously acquire a high level of performance for the identification and volume measurements of IRF, SRF, and PED in nAMD, providing accurate and repeatable predictions. Including layer segmentation during training and squeeze-excite block in the network architecture were shown to boost the performance.

Translational Relevance: Potential applications include measurements of specific fluid compartments with high reproducibility, assistance in treatment decisions, and the diagnostic or scientific evaluation of relevant subgroups.