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Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is a novel imaging modality that has been widely utilized in ophthalmology and neuroscience studies to observe retinal vessels and microvascular systems. However, publicly available OCTA datasets remain scarce. In this paper, we introduce the largest and most comprehensive OCTA dataset dubbed OCTA-500, which contains OCTA imaging under two fields of view (FOVs) from 500 subjects. The dataset provides rich images and annotations including two modalities (OCT/OCTA volumes), six types of projections, four types of text labels (age / gender / eye / disease) and seven types of segmentation labels (large vessel/capillary/artery/vein/2D FAZ/3D FAZ/retinal layers). Then, we propose a multi-object segmentation task called CAVF, which integrates capillary segmentation, artery segmentation, vein segmentation, and FAZ segmentation under a unified framework. In addition, we optimize the 3D-to-2D image projection network (IPN) to IPN-V2 to serve as one of the segmentation baselines. Experimental results demonstrate that IPN-V2 achieves an ~10% mIoU improvement over IPN on CAVF task. Finally, we further study the impact of several dataset characteristics: the training set size, the model input (OCT/OCTA, 3D volume/2D projection), the baseline networks, and the diseases. The dataset and code are publicly available at: https://ieee-dataport.org/open-access/octa-500.

Background and Aims Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the worldwide leading cause of blindness among the elderly, especially in developed countries. The possible association between apolipoprotein E (ApoE) polymorphism (e2, e3, e4) and AMD has been extensively investigated with conflicting results, especially when specifying different clinical phenotypes of AMD. Herein, we conducted a meta-analysis by integrating several recent large-sample studies to verify the effect of ApoE polymorphisms on AMD subtypes. Methods The retrieve for targeted literature was conducted based on the PubMed, Embase, Cochrane library, and Web of Science. Summary odds ratio (OR) and its 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were used for estimation of risk. The p -value was adjusted due to the multiple comparison. Results A total of 12 studies included in the final summary analysis, including 13842 cases and 38647 controls. ApoE e4 carrier was inversely associated with early stage AMD (OR = 0.889, 95% CI = 0.82–0.97), geographic atrophy (OR = 0.594, 95% CI = 0.43–0.83) and neovascular AMD (OR = 0.670, 95% CI = 0.58–0.76). Stratification analysis by ethnicity revealed that the ApoE e4 carriers was associated with neovascular AMD in both Caucasians (OR = 0.62, 95% CI = 0.47–0.83) and East Asians (OR = 0.68, 95% CI = 0.58–0.79). A significant association of ApoE e2 carriers was only found with early AMD in Black and East Asian population, however small samples and limited studies restrict its generalization. Conclusion Our meta-analysis revealed a significantly protective role of e4 on each subtypes of AMD, but no supportive evidence of the association of e2 with AMD. Thus, further studies with larger samples are needed to understand the precise role of e2 on AMD susceptibility.

This paper, we discussed a general multi-objective optimization problem under quasi-normal cone condition.we prove that for almost every point in the feasible region, a smooth and bounded homotopy path can be derived and that the algorithm converges to the K-K-T point of multi-objective programming problem. Numerical simulation confirmed the viability of this method.