Segmentation of retinal detachment and retinoschisis in OCT images based on complementary multi-class segmentation networks

Retinal detachment (RD) and retinoschisis (RS) are the main complications leading to vision loss in high myopia. Accurate segmentation of RD and RS, including its subcategories (outer, middle, and inner retinoschisis) in optical coherence tomography images is of great clinical significance in the diagnosis and management of high myopia. For this multi-class segmentation task, we propose a novel framework named complementary multi-class segmentation networks. Based on domain knowledge, a three-class segmentation path (TSP) and a five-class segmentation path (FSP) are designed, and their outputs are integrated through additional decision fusion layers to achieve improved segmentation in a complementary manner. In TSP, a cross-fusion global feature module is adopted to achieve global receptive field. In FSP, a novel three-dimensional contextual information perception module is proposed to capture long-range contexts, and a classification branch is designed to provide useful features for segmentation. A new category loss is also proposed in FSP to help better identify the lesion categories. Experiment results show that the proposed method achieves superior performance for joint segmentation of RD and the three subcategories of RS, with an average Dice coefficient of 84.83%.