Using Deep Learning to Segment Retinal Vascular Leakage and Occlusion in Retinal Vasculitis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Purpose Retinal vasculitis (RV) is characterised by retinal vascular leakage, occlusion or both on fluorescein angiography (FA). There is no standard scheme available to segment RV features. We aimed to develop a deep learning model to segment both vascular leakage and occlusion in RV. Methods Four hundred and sixty-three FA images from 82 patients with retinal vasculitis were used to develop a deep learning model, in 60:20:20 ratio for training:validation:testing. Parameters, including deep learning architectures (DeeplabV3+, UNet++ and UNet), were altered to find the best binary segmentation model separately for retinal vascular leakage and occlusion, using a Dice score to determine the reliability of each model. Results Our best model for vascular leakage had a Dice score of 0.6279 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.5584–0.6974). For occlusion, the best model achieved a Dice score of 0.6992 (95% CI 0.6109–0.7874). Conclusion Our RV segmentation models could perform reliable segmentation for retinal vascular leakage and occlusion in FAs of RV patients.