Automatic detection of the region of interest in corneal endothelium images using dense convolutional neural networks

Juan P. Vigueras-Guillén, Hans G. Lemij, Jeroen Van Rooij, Koenraad A. Vermeer, Lucas J. Van Vliet

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

    6 Citations (Scopus)
    42 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    In images of the corneal endothelium (CE) acquired by specular microscopy, endothelial cells are commonly only visible in a part of the image due to varying contrast, mainly caused by challenging imaging conditions as a result of a strongly curved endothelium. In order to estimate the morphometric parameters of the corneal endothelium, the analyses need to be restricted to trustworthy regions - the region of interest (ROI) - where individual cells are discernible. We developed an automatic method to find the ROI by Dense U-nets, a densely connected network of convolutional layers. We tested the method on a heterogeneous dataset of 140 images, which contains a large number of blurred, noisy, and/or out of focus images, where the selection of the ROI for automatic biomarker extraction is vital. By using edge images as input, which can be estimated after retraining the same network, Dense U-net detected the trustworthy areas with an accuracy of 98.94% and an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.998, without being affected by the class imbalance (9:1 in our dataset). After applying the estimated ROI to the edge images, the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) in the estimated endothelial parameters was 0.80% for ECD, 3.60% for CV, and 2.55% for HEX.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceeedings of SPIE
    Subtitle of host publicationMedical Imaging 2019 : Image Processing
    EditorsElsa D. Angelini, Elsa D. Angelini, Elsa D. Angelini, Bennett A. Landman
    PublisherSPIE
    Number of pages12
    Volume10949
    ISBN (Electronic)978-151062545-7
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2019
    EventMedical Imaging 2019: Image Processing - San Diego, United States
    Duration: 19 Feb 201921 Feb 2019

    Publication series

    NameMEDICAL IMAGING 2019: IMAGE PROCESSING
    ISSN (Print)0277-786X

    Conference

    ConferenceMedical Imaging 2019: Image Processing
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CitySan Diego
    Period19/02/1921/02/19

    Bibliographical note

    Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

    Keywords

    • biomarkers
    • Dense U-net
    • fully CNN
    • segmentation
    • specular microscopy

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