Purpose: This work aims to identify areas with sub-retinal-pigment-epithelium (sub-RPE) accumulations on 2dimensional (2D) color-fundus-photographs (CFPs) in patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) using the definitions in spectral-domain-optical-coherence-tomography (SD-OCT) imaging. Detecting and quantifying areas of RPE elevations (most notably drusen) in CFPs will aid in objective evaluation of AMDseverity-scores as well as patient selection and monitoring in clinical trials. Methods: A retinal-layersegmentation algorithm for SD-OCTs was used to automatically identify areas with RPE elevations and build the ground-truth 2D binary maps for training. CFP was registered to the enface projection images of SD-OCT to overlay OCT-defined drusen areas on CFP images. A 2D-UNet segmentation network was trained using bilateral stereo CFP pairs in a Siamese architecture that share OCT-defined drusen areas as ground-truth. Results: Dataset consists of AMD patients with 127 train and 23 test eyes. Dice-similarity-coefficient for the predictions on CFPs was found to be 0.70±0.13 (mean±std), and overall accuracy was 0.73. 89% of test eyes exhibited drusen area prediction error <1mm 2 compared to reading-center measures. Conclusion: Our work demonstrates the potential of using 2D CFP images to predict areas of sub-RPE elevations as defined in 3D-SD-OCT imaging. Qualitative evaluation of the mismatch between the two imaging modalities shows regions with complementary features in a subset of the cases making it challenging to achieve optimal segmentation. However, the results show clinically useful performance in CFPs that can be used to quantify accumulations in the sub-RPE space which are the key pathologic biomarkers of AMD relevant to patient selection and trial outcome measure designs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.