Attention Assisted Patch-Wise CNN for the Segmentation of Fluids from the Retinal Optical Coherence Tomography Images

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is an important imaging modality in ophthalmology to visualize the abnormalities present in the retina. One of the major reasons for blindness is the accumulation of fluids in the various layers of the retina called retinal cysts. Accurate estimation of the type of cyst and its volume is important for effective treatment planning. In this paper, we propose attention assisted convolutional neural network-based architecture to detect and quantify three types of retinal cysts namely the intra-retinal cyst, subretinal cyst and pigmented epithelial detachment from the OCT images of the human retina. The proposed architecture has an encoder-decoder structure with an attention and a multi-scale module. The qualitative and quantitative performance of the model is evaluated on the publicly available RETOUCH retinal OCT fluid detection challenge data set. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision, recall, and dice coefficient. Furthermore, the proposed model is computationally efficient due to its less number of model parameters.