Reducing manual labeling requirements and improved retinal ganglion cell identification in 3D AO-OCT volumes using semi-supervised learning

Adaptive optics-optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT) allows for the three-dimensional visualization of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in the living human eye. Quantitative analyses of RGCs have significant potential for improving the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases such as glaucoma. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have made possible the automatic identification and analysis of RGCs within the complex three-dimensional retinal volumes obtained with such imaging. However, the current state-of-the-art ML approach relies on fully supervised training, which demands large amounts of training labels. Each volume requires many hours of expert manual annotation. Here, two semi-supervised training schemes are introduced, (i) cross-consistency training and (ii) cross pseudo supervision that utilize unlabeled AO-OCT volumes together with a minimal set of labels, vastly reducing the labeling demands. Moreover, these methods outperformed their fully supervised counterpart and achieved accuracy comparable to that of human experts.