B2e-Cdg: Artifact Removal for Enhanced Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography Using Conditional Guidance Diffusion

作     者：Xu, Jing Fu, Suzhong Xing, Jiwei Xue, Linyan Wang, Cheng Tuchin, Valery V. Zhao, Qingliang 

作者机构：State Key Laboratory of Molecular Vaccinology and Molecular Diagnostics Organ Transplantation Institute China Institute of Artificial Intelligence Xiamen University Xiamen361102 China State Key Laboratory of Vaccines for Infectious Diseases Xiang An Biomedicine Laboratory School of Public Health Xiamen University Xiamen361102 China  Shenzhen518172 China College of Quality and Technical Supervision Hebei University Baoding071002 China School of Informatics Computer Science and Technology Department Xiamen University Xiamen361005 China Institute of Physics and Science Medical Center Saratov State University Saratov410012 Russia Laboratory of Laser Molecular Imaging and Machine Learning Tomsk State University Tomsk634050 Russia Institute of Precision Mechanics and Control FRS "Saratov Scientific Centre of the RAS" Saratov410028 Russia  China 

出 版 物：《SSRN》 

年 卷 期：2024年

核心收录：

主　　题：Optical coherence tomography 

摘      要：Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) is a revolutionary technology widely used to diagnose and manage fundus, skin and cardiovascular diseases. However, unavoidable movements, such as breathing, cause motion artifacts in images, which can significantly degrade image quality, obscure critical vascular details, and reduce the diagnostic reliability of the modality. Although recent advances in learning-based image inpainting methods for OCTA enface images have made notable progress in artifact removal, these methods still require the collection of large amounts of accurately labeled data and the generation of pseudo stripes to create paired training sets. Furthermore, the abundant structural information and flow intensity signals present in OCTA B-scans are nonnegligible. Hence we proposed B-scans to Enface Conditional Diffusion Guidance (B2E-CDG) for translation from signal-void B-scans to available B-scans. We introduce the normal B-scans in a connection manner and the specified reference B-scans in a gradient-based manner as style feature guidance into the diffusion model. Conditional guidance facilitates a more controllable and precise generation process for B-scans flow signal recovery. The requirement for labeled image collection and pseudo stripes is obviated, as the repetitive scanning nature of OCTA naturally results in paired datasets comprising signal-void and normal B-scans. The experimental results demonstrated that B2E-CDG effectively removes artifacts and restores vascular and structural information obscured by artifacts. This work shows superior vascular recovery and artifact removal capabilities in metrics and downstream tasks, enhancing the usability of OCTA in diagnostics. © 2024, The Authors. All rights reserved.