Sparse-Based Domain Adaptation Network for OCTA Image Super-Resolution Reconstruction

Retinal Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) with high-resolution is important for the quantification and analysis of retinal vasculature. However, the resolution of OCTA images is inversely proportional to the field of view at the same sampling frequency, which is not conducive to clinicians for analyzing larger vascular areas. In this paper, we propose a novel <bold>S</bold>parse-based domain <bold>A</bold>daptation <bold>S</bold>uper-<bold>R</bold>esolution network (SASR) for the reconstruction of realistic <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$6\times \text{6}{\rm{mm}}^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula>/low-resolution (LR) OCTA images to high-resolution (HR) representations. To be more specific, we first perform a simple degradation of the <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3\times \text{3}\,{\rm{mm}}^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula>/high-resolution (HR) image to obtain the synthetic LR image. An efficient registration method is then employed to register the synthetic LR with its corresponding <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3\times \text{3}\,{\rm{mm}}^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula> image region within the <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$6\times \text{6}\,{\rm{mm}}^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula> image to obtain the cropped realistic LR image. We then propose a multi-level super-resolution model for the fully-supervised reconstruction of the synthetic data, guiding the reconstruction of the realistic LR images through a generative-adversarial strategy that allows the synthetic and realistic LR images to be unified in the feature domain. Finally, a novel sparse edge-aware loss is designed to dynamically optimize the vessel edge structure. Extensive experiments on two OCTA sets have shown that our method performs better than state-of-the-art super-resolution reconstruction methods. In addition, we have investigated the performance of the reconstruction results on retina structure segmentations, which further validate the effectiveness of our approach.