Researchers did this study to generate and evaluate individualized post-therapeutic optical coherence tomography (OCT) images that could predict the short-term response of antivascular endothelial growth factor therapy for typical neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) based on pre-therapeutic images using a GAN.
Researchers included a total of 476 pairs of pre-therapeutic and post-therapeutic OCT images of patients with nAMD in the training set. In contrast, 50 pre-therapeutic OCT images were included in the tests set retrospectively, and their corresponding post-therapeutic OCT images were used to evaluate the synthetic images. The researchers adopted the pix2pixHD method for image synthesis. Researchers performed three experiments to assess the synthetic images’ quality, authenticity, and predictive power by retinal specialists.
The analysis revealed that 92% of the synthetic OCT images had sufficient quality for further clinical interpretation. Researchers could identify only 26%–30% of synthetic post-therapeutic images as synthetic images. The accuracy in predicting the macular status of wet or dry was 0.85 (95% CI 0.74 to 0.95).
The study concluded that GAN’s great potential to generate post-therapeutic OCT images with good quality and high accuracy.
Reference: https://bjo.bmj.com/content/104/12/1735
