Purpose: To develop a computer-aided diagnostic tool for automated detection and quantification of polypoidal regions in indocyanine green angiography (ICGA) images.
Methods: The ICGA sequences of 59 polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy (PCV) treatment-naïve patients from five Asian countries (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand) were provided by the EVEREST study. The ground truth was provided by the reading center for the presence of polypoidal regions. The proposed detection algorithm used both temporal and spatial features to characterize the severity of polypoidal lesions in ICGA sequences. Leave-one-out cross validation was carried out so that each patient was used once as the validation sample. For each patient, a fixed detection threshold of 0.5 on the severity was applied to obtain sensitivity, specificity, and balanced accuracy with respect to the ground truth.
Results: Our system achieved an average accuracy of 0.9126 (sensitivity = 0.9125, specificity = 0.9127) for detection of polyps in the 59 ICGA sequences. Among the total of 222 features extracted from ICGA sequence, the spatial variances exhibited best discriminative power in distinguishing between polyp and nonpolyp regions. The results also indicated the importance of combining spatial and temporal features to further improve detection accuracy.
Conclusions: The developed software provided a means of detecting and quantifying polypoidal regions in ICGA images for the first time.
Translational relevance: This preliminary study demonstrated a computer-aided diagnostic tool, which enables objective evaluation of PCV and its progression. Ophthalmologists can easily visualize the polypoidal regions and obtain quantitative information about polyps by using the proposed system.
Keywords: Polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy; computer-aided diagnostic tool; indocyanine green angiography.