Deep‐learning‐based motion correction in optical coherence tomography angiography

• Published in: Journal of biophotonics 2021-12, Vol.14 (12), p.e202100097-n/a
• Main Authors: Li, Ang, Du, Congwu, Pan, Yingtian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Angiography; Animals; Artificial neural networks; Deep Learning; deep neural networks; Image classification; Image processing; Image restoration; In vivo methods and tests; Machine learning; Medical imaging; Mice; microvascular network; Microvasculature; Motion; motion correction; Neural networks; Neuroimaging; OCTA; Optical Coherence Tomography; Spatial discrimination; Spatial resolution; Tomography; Tomography, Optical Coherence
• ISSN: 1864-063X; 1864-0648
• DOI: 10.1002/jbio.202100097

Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is a widely applied tool to image microvascular networks with high spatial resolution and sensitivity. Due to limited imaging speed, the artifacts caused by tissue motion can severely compromise visualization of the microvascular networks and quantification of OCTA images. In this article, we propose a deep‐learning‐based framework to effectively correct motion artifacts and retrieve microvascular architectures. This method comprised two deep neural networks in which the first subnet was applied to distinguish motion corrupted B‐scan images from a volumetric dataset. Based on the classification results, the artifacts could be removed from the en face maximum‐intensity‐projection (MIP) OCTA image. To restore the disturbed vasculature induced by artifact removal, the second subnet, an inpainting neural network, was utilized to reconnect the broken vascular networks. We applied the method to postprocess OCTA images of the microvascular networks in mouse cortex in vivo. Both image comparison and quantitative analysis show that the proposed method can significantly improve OCTA image by efficiently recovering microvasculature from the overwhelming motion artifacts. Motion artifacts significantly bias the visualization and quantification of OCT angiography (OCTA) images. Here, we present a deep‐learning‐based method to effectively reduce the motion artifacts, in which two deep neural networks were applied to identify artifacts and restore microvasculature, respectively. As shown in the figure, the proposed method can efficiently retrieve vasculature signal from the overwhelming motion artifacts (A) and significantly enhance OCTA image (B).