Predicting OCT images of short-term response to anti-VEGF treatment for retinal vein occlusion using generative adversarial network

To generate and evaluate post-therapeutic optical coherence tomography (OCT) images based on pre-therapeutic images with generative adversarial network (GAN) to predict the short-term response of patients with retinal vein occlusion (RVO) to anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) therapy. Real-world imaging data were retrospectively collected from 1 May 2017, to 1 June 2021. A total of 515 pairs of pre-and post-therapeutic OCT images of patients with RVO were included in the training set, while 68 pre-and post-therapeutic OCT images were included in the validation set. A pix2pixHD method was adopted to predict post-therapeutic OCT images in RVO patients after anti-VEGF therapy. The quality and similarity of synthetic OCT images were evaluated by screening and evaluation experiments. We quantitatively and qualitatively assessed the prognostic accuracy of the synthetic post-therapeutic OCT images. The post-therapeutic OCT images generated by the pix2pixHD algorithm were comparable to the actual images in edema resorption response. Retinal specialists found most synthetic images (62/68) difficult to differentiate from the real ones. The mean absolute error (MAE) of the central macular thickness (CMT) between the synthetic and real OCT images was 26.33 ± 15.81 μm. There was no statistical difference in CMT between the synthetic and the real images. In this retrospective study, the application of the pix2pixHD algorithm objectively predicted the short-term response of each patient to anti-VEGF therapy based on OCT images with high accuracy, suggestive of its clinical value, especially for screening patients with relatively poor prognosis and potentially guiding clinical treatment. Importantly, our artificial intelligence-based prediction approach's non-invasiveness, repeatability, and cost-effectiveness can improve compliance and follow-up management of this patient population.