Abstract
Diabetic macular edema (DME) is a leading cause of vision loss worldwide. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) serves as a widely accepted imaging tool for diagnosing DME due to its non-invasiveness and high resolution cross-sectional view. Clinical evaluation of Hyperreflective Foci (HRF) in OCT contributes to understanding the origins of DME and predicting disease progression or treatment efficacy. However, limited information and a significant imbalance between foreground and background in HRF present challenges for its precise segmentation in OCT images. In this study, we propose an attention mechanism-based MUlti-dimensional Semantic Enhancement Network (MUSE-Net) for HRF segmentation to address these challenges. Specifically, our MUSE-Net comprises attention-based multi-dimensional semantic information enhancement modules and class-imbalance-insensitive joint loss. The adaptive region guidance module softly allocates regional importance in slice, enriching the single-slice semantic information. The adjacent slice guidance module exploits the remote information across consecutive slices, enriching the multi-dimensional semantic information. Class-imbalance-insensitive joint loss combines pixel-level perception optimization with image-level considerations, alleviating the gradient dominance of the background during model training. Our experimental results demonstrate that MUSE-Net outperforms existing methods over two datasets respectively. To further promote the reproducible research, we made the code and these two datasets online available.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62272444, 62371442, 62103398), Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LR22F020008, LZ23F010002, LR24F010002), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2023M743629).
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Wang, X. et al. (2024). A Hyperreflective Foci Segmentation Network for OCT Images with Multi-dimensional Semantic Enhancement. In: Linguraru, M.G., et al. Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2024. MICCAI 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15001. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-72378-0_60
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-72378-0_60
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