Modelling Geographic Atrophy Progression using Implicit Neural Representations

Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is the major cause of blindness in the Western world. Its late dry phase is characterised by irreversible atrophic areas, namely Geographic Atrophy (GA). Longitudinal Fundus Autofluorescence (FAF) image acquisitions are currently the main tool for assessing lesion growth over time at the image level. However, due to its highly individualised progression, the evolution of late AMD remains poorly understood. In this work, we propose using Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) to model GA progression at the individual level in a low-data setting. Our approach generates both FAF and GA segmentation at both past and future time points. Among the comparison models, our method achieves competitive segmentation quality across different scenarios, yielding the lowest Mean Absolute Error (MAE) for the GA lesion area and the highest DICE score, without sacrificing FAF image quality. The code is available at https://github.com/SimoneSarrocco/ga-progression-with-inrs.

Conditioning 3D Diffusion Models with 2D Images: Towards Standardized OCT Volumes through En Face-Informed Super-Resolution

High anisotropy in volumetric medical images can lead to the inconsistent quantification of anatomical and pathological structures. Particularly in optical coherence tomography (OCT), slice spacing can substantially vary across and within datasets, studies, and clinical practices. We propose to standardize OCT volumes to less anisotropic volumes by conditioning 3D diffusion models with en face scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) imaging data, a 2D modality already commonly available in clinical practice. We trained and evaluated on data from the multicenter and multimodal MACUSTAR study. While upsampling the number of slices by a factor of 8, our method outperforms tricubic interpolation and diffusion models without en face conditioning in terms of perceptual similarity metrics. Qualitative results demonstrate improved coherence and structural similarity. Our approach allows for better informed generative decisions, potentially reducing hallucinations. We hope this work will provide the next step towards standardized high-quality volumetric imaging, enabling more consistent quantifications.

Diffusion Models for Implicit Image Segmentation Ensembles

Diffusion models have shown impressive performance for generative modelling of images. In this paper, we present a novel semantic segmentation method based on diffusion models. By modifying the training and sampling scheme, we show that diffusion models can perform lesion segmentation of medical images. To generate an image specific segmentation, we train the model on the ground truth segmentation, and use the image as a prior during training and in every step during the sampling process. With the given stochastic sampling process, we can generate a distribution of segmentation masks. This property allows us to compute pixel-wise uncertainty maps of the segmentation, and allows an implicit ensemble of segmentations that increases the segmentation performance. We evaluate our method on the BRATS2020 dataset for brain tumor segmentation. Compared to state-of-the-art segmentation models, our approach yields good segmentation results and, additionally, detailed uncertainty maps.