Digital resolution enhancement in low transverse sampling optical coherence tomography angiography using deep learning

Abstract

Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) requires high transverse sampling density for visualizing retinal and choroidal capillaries. Low transverse sampling causes digital resolution degradation, such as the angiograms in wide-field OCTA. In this paper, we propose to address this problem using deep learning. We conducted extensive experiments on converting the centrally cropped 3 × 3 mm2 field of view (FOV) of the 8 × 8 mm2 foveal OCTA images (a sampling density of 22.9 µm) to the native 3 × 3 mm2 en face OCTA images (a sampling density of 12.2 µm). We employed a cycle-consistent adversarial network architecture in this conversion. The quantitative analysis using the perceptual similarity measures shows the generated OCTA images are closer to the native 3 × 3 mm2 scans. Besides, the results show the proposed method could also enhance the signal-to-noise ratio. We further applied our method to enhance diseased cases and calculate vascular biomarkers, which demonstrates its generalization performance and clinical perspective.