Capsule Network-based architectures for the segmentation of sub-retinal serous fluid in optical coherence tomography images of central serous chorioretinopathy.

Central serous chorioretinopathy (CSCR) is a chorioretinal disorder of the eye characterized by serous detachment of the neurosensory retina at the posterior pole of the eye. CSCR results from the accumulation of subretinal fluid (SRF) due to idiopathic defects at the level of the retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) that allows serous fluid from the choriocapillaris to diffuse into the subretinal space between RPE and neurosensory retinal layers. This condition is presently investigated by clinicians using invasive angiography or non-invasive optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging. OCT images provide a representation of the fluid underlying the retina, and in the absence of automated segmentation tools, currently only a qualitative assessment of the same is used to follow the progression of the disease. Automated segmentation of the SRF can prove to be extremely useful for the assessment of progression and for the timely management of CSCR. In this paper, we adopt an existing architecture called SegCaps, which is based on the recently introduced Capsule Networks concept, for the segmentation of SRF from CSCR OCT images. Furthermore, we propose an enhancement to SegCaps, which we have termed as DRIP-Caps, that utilizes the concepts of Dilation, Residual Connections, Inception Blocks, and Capsule Pooling to address the defined problem. The proposed model outperforms the benchmark UNet architecture while reducing the number of trainable parameters by 54.21%. Moreover, it reduces the computation complexity of SegCaps by reducing the number of trainable parameters by 37.85%, with competitive performance. The experiments demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed model, as evidenced by its remarkable performance even with a limited number of training samples. Graphical abstract is mandatory please provide.

Multi-Res-Attention UNet: A CNN Model for the Segmentation of Focal Cortical Dysplasia Lesions from Magnetic Resonance Images.

In this work, we have focused on the segmentation of Focal Cortical Dysplasia (FCD) regions from MRI images. FCD is a congenital malformation of brain development that is considered as the most common causative of intractable epilepsy in adults and children. To our knowledge, the latest work concerning the automatic segmentation of FCD was proposed using a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) model based on UNet. While there is no doubt that the model outperformed conventional image processing techniques by a considerable margin, it suffers from several pitfalls. First, it does not account for the large semantic gap of feature maps passed from the encoder to the decoder layer through the long skip connections. Second, it fails to leverage the salient features that represent complex FCD lesions and suppress most of the irrelevant features in the input sample. We propose Multi-Res-Attention UNet; a novel hybrid skip connection-based FCN architecture that addresses these drawbacks. Moreover, we have trained it from scratch for the detection of FCD from 3 T MRI 3D FLAIR images and conducted 5-fold cross-validation to evaluate the model. FCD detection rate (Recall) of 92% was achieved for patient wise analysis.