Pathological Retinal Region Segmentation From OCT Images Using Geometric Relation Based Augmentation

Dwarikanath Mahapatra, Behzad Bozorgtabar, Ling Shao; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 9611-9620

Medical image segmentation is important for computer aided diagnosis. Pixelwise manual annotations of large datasets require high expertise and is time consuming. Conventional data augmentations have limited benefit by not fully representing the underlying distribution of the training set, thus affecting model robustness when tested on images captured from different sources. Prior work leverages synthetic images for data augmentation ignoring the interleaved geometric relationship between different anatomical labels. We propose improvements over previous GAN-based medical image synthesis methods by jointly encoding the intrinsic relationship of geometry and shape. Latent space variable sampling results in diverse generated images from a base image and improves robustness. Augmented datasets using our method for automatic segmentation of retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) images outperform existing methods on the public RETOUCH dataset having images captured from different acquisition procedures. Ablation studies and visual analysis also demonstrate benefits of integrating geometry and diversity.