MF-Net: Multi-Scale Information Fusion Network for CNV Segmentation in Retinal OCT Images

Abstract

Choroid neovascularization (CNV) is one of the blinding ophthalmologic diseases. It is mainly caused by new blood vessels growing in choroid and penetrating Bruch's membrane. Accurate segmentation of CNV is essential for ophthalmologists to analyze the condition of the patient and specify treatment plan. Although many deep learning-based methods have achieved promising results in many medical image segmentation tasks, CNV segmentation in retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) images is still very challenging as the blur boundary of CNV, large morphological differences, speckle noise, and other similar diseases interference. In addition, the lack of pixel-level annotation data is also one of the factors that affect the further improvement of CNV segmentation accuracy. To improve the accuracy of CNV segmentation, a novel multi-scale information fusion network (MF-Net) based on U-Shape architecture is proposed for CNV segmentation in retinal OCT images. A novel multi-scale adaptive-aware deformation module (MAD) is designed and inserted into the top of the encoder path, aiming at guiding the model to focus on multi-scale deformation of the targets, and aggregates the contextual information. Meanwhile, to improve the ability of the network to learn to supplement low-level local high-resolution semantic information to high-level feature maps, a novel semantics-details aggregation module (SDA) between encoder and decoder is proposed. In addition, to leverage unlabeled data to further improve the CNV segmentation, a semi-supervised version of MF-Net is designed based on pseudo-label data augmentation strategy, which can leverage unlabeled data to further improve CNV segmentation accuracy. Finally, comprehensive experiments are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed MF-Net and SemiMF-Net. The experiment results show that both proposed MF-Net and SemiMF-Net outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms.

DRFNet: a deep radiomic fusion network for nAMD/PCV differentiation in OCT images

“…Xi et al (2020) proposed a Informative Attention Convolutional Neural Network (IA-Net) in which the attention enhancement block was used to force the model to pay high attention on lesion. Meng et al (2021)proposed a multi-scale information fusion network (MF-Net). A multi-scale adaptive-aware deformation (MAD) module and a semantics-details aggregation module (SDA) were proposed to improve the ability of the network to learn highlevel feature maps.…”