RSAPower: Random Style Augmentation Driven Structure Perception Network for Generalized Retinal OCT Fluid Segmentation

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) imaging is extensively utilized for non-invasive observation of pathological conditions, such as retinal fluid-associated diseases. Accurate fluid segmentation in OCT images is therefore critical for quantifying disease severity and aiding clinical decision-making. However, achieving precise segmentation remains challenging due to pathological variations in shape and size, uncertain boundaries, and low contrast of fluid. Most importantly, variability in OCT image styles across different vendors and centers significantly affects fluid segmentation, leading to poor generalization to unseen domains. To address this, we propose a novel method, RSAPower, to enhance the generalization ability of fluid perception networks via style augmentation for retinal fluid segmentation. Specifically, RSAPower comprises a plug-and-play random style transform augmentation (RSTAug) module and a novel fluid perception network (FLPNet) for end-to-end training. The RSTAug module generates new random-style data from the source domain, preserving realistic pathological and structural features. The FLPNet benefits from a novel hybrid structure attention (HSA) module to perceive fluid’s spatial features and long-range dependence. Furthermore, FLPNet adapts to the diverse augmented data through a saliency-guided multi-scale attention (SGMA) block, boosting its segmentation performance. We validate RSAPower against various state-of-the-art methods using two publicly available datasets, Retouch and Kermany. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed method’s superior generalization ability and effectiveness in fluid segmentation.