Unpaired and Self-supervised Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography Super-Resolution

Chaofan Zeng, Songtao Yuan, Qiang Chen

Abstract: Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is usually used to observe the blood flow information of retina and choroid. It is meaningful for clinicians to observe more microvascular details by enhancing the resolution of OCTA images, which is conducive to the diagnosis of diseases. However, due to the limitation of imaging equipment, when the resolution of OCTA is improved, the field of view (FOV) will be reduced. In the existing methods to enhance the resolution of OCTA, paired training data from the same eye are generally required, but paired data are usually difficult to be obtained, and the resolution of enhanced images is difficult to exceed that of original high resolution (3 × 3 mm2) OCTA images. Therefore, to improve the resolution of low resolution (6 × 6 mm2) OCTA images, this paper proposes an unpaired and self-supervised OCTA super-resolution (USOSR) method by down sampling and enhancing the original 3 × 3 mm2 OCTA images. Experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced 6 × 6 mm2 OCTA images have significantly stronger contrast, sharper edges and higher information entropy than the original images.