ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Cell. Neurosci.
Sec. Cellular Neuropathology
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fncel.2025.1605639
This article is part of the Research TopicRetinal Degenerative Diseases: Processes and Potential TreatmentsView all 5 articles
Evaluation of retinal structure changes with AI-based OCT image segmentation for sodium iodate induced retinal degeneration
Provisionally accepted
- 1Visual Function Core, National Eye Institute (NIH), Bethesda, United States
- 2OSIO Bioinformatics Core, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, United States
- 3Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, University of California, Davis, Sacramento, California, United States
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Segmentations of retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) images provide valuable information about each specific retinal layer. However, processing images from degenerative retina remains challenging. This study developed artificial intelligence (AI)-based segmentation to analyze structure changes in sodium iodate (SI)-treated mice. The software is capable of segmenting 7 retinal layers and 1 choroid layer. Analyzing OCT images captured at days post SI-injection (PI) revealed early changes in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) layer, with increase in thickness and reduction in reflectance calculated by estimated Attenuation Coefficients (eAC). On the other hand, eAC for outer nuclear layer (ONL) exhibited early and sustained increase after SI treatment. SI induced exponential reduction in ONL thickness with a half-reduction time of about 3 days, indicating progressive photoreceptor degeneration. The extent of degeneration was correlated with ONL eAC level at PI1. Inner retinal layers showed bi-phasic reactions, with initial increases in layer thickness that peaked at around PI3, followed by gradual reduction to lower than baseline levels. In addition, SI also induced transient increases in vitreous particles concentrated around optic nerve head.Furthermore, there was a gradual reduction of choroid thickness after SI treatment. These results indicate the AI-segmentation tool's usefulness for providing a sensitive and accurate assessment of structure changes in diseased retina and revealed more detailed characterization of SI-induced degeneration in all retinal layers with distinct time courses. Our results also support ONL reflectance changes as an early biomarker for retinal degeneration.
Keywords: Mouse, Retina, Optical Coherence Tomography, Sodium iodate, segmentation, Choroid, biomarker
Received: 03 Apr 2025; Accepted: 26 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zeng, Zhou, LI, Alvisio, Czech, Bissig and Qian. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Haohua Qian, Visual Function Core, National Eye Institute (NIH), Bethesda, United States
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