WaveFormer: A Wavelet Transformer for Parkinson Disease's Retinal Layer Segmentation in OCT

Pathology symptoms of Parkinson disease (PD) are different from those of retinal diseases in the retinal layers, which are subtle. However, segmenting pathology information of PD from retinal layers automatically based on optical coherence tomography (OCT) images has not been studied before. Although existing Transformer-based segmentation methods have achieved good segmentation results, they have limitations in capturing local context information. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can construct local context dependencies among pixels, which is complementary to Transformers. Particularly, edge information extraction is significant for accurate retinal layer segmentation, which is ignored by both Transformers and CNNs but can be captured by frequency domain learning methods. To fully leverage the advantages of Transformers, CNNs, and frequency domain learning methods, we propose a Wavelet Transformer (WaveFormer) for retinal layer segmentation based on OCT images. In the WaveFormer, we design a Wavelet Spatial Attention block to exploit the potential of frequency information. Based on these advantages, WaveFormer can be data-efficient in limited OCT images of PD. The experimental results on the OCT-PD segmentation dataset show that our WaveFormer outperforms existing Transformers and CNNs. For example, WaveFormer outperforms Swin-UNet by 3.41% of IoU.