Automated segmentation of choroidal neovascularization in optical coherence tomography images using multi-scale convolutional neural networks with structure prior

Automated segmentation of choroidal neovascularization (CNV) in optical coherence tomography (OCT) images plays an important role for the treatment of CNV disease. This paper proposes multi-scale convolutional neural networks with structure prior to segment CNV from OCT data. The proposed framework consists of two stages. In the first stage, the structure prior learning method based on sparse representation-based classification and the local potential function is developed to capture the global spatial structure and local similarity structure prior. The obtained prior can be used to improve the distinctiveness between CNV and background patches. In the second stage, multi-scale CNN model with incorporation of the learned structure prior is constructed for CNV segmentation. In this stage, multi-scale analysis is used to capture effective contextual information, which is robust to varying sizes of CNV. The proposed method was evaluated on 15 spectral domain OCT data with CNV. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method.