A Conditional Random Field Weakly Supervised Segmentation Approach for Segmenting keratocytes Cells in Corneal Optical Coherence Tomography Images

Abstract

<p>Keratocytes are vital for maintaining the overall health of human<br />cornea as they preserve the corneal transparency and help in healing<br />corneal injuries. Manual segmentation of keratocytes is challenging,<br />time consuming and also needs an expert. Here, we propose<br />a novel semi-automatic segmentation framework, called Conditional<br />Random FieldWeakly Supervised Segmentation (CRF-WSS)<br />to perform the keratocytes cell segmentation. The proposed framework<br />exploits the concept of dictionary learning in a sparse model<br />along with the Conditional Random Field (CRF) modeling to segment<br />keratocytes cells in Ultra High Resolution Optical Coherence<br />Tomography (UHR-OCT) images of human cornea. The results<br />show higher accuracy for the proposed CRF-WSS framework compare<br />to the other tested Supervised Segmentation (SS) andWeakly<br />Supervised Segmentation (WSS) methods.</p>