Towards Investigating Residual Hearing Loss: Quantification of Fibrosis in a Novel Cochlear OCT Dataset

Objective: Cochlear implants (CIs) are bionic prostheses that restores hearing via electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. Hybrid CIs, which use electroacoustic stimulation (EAS), combine residual low-frequency acoustic hearing with CI electrical stimulation. Intracochlear fibrosis, which forms in response to the presence of the implant, may impede residual hearing function and gradually reduce the efficacy of EAS. It is therefore a translational objective to study the formation of cochlear fibrosis in rodents, with the goal of reducing fibrotic burden and improving outcomes for CI patients. Methods: We generate and annotate a novel dataset of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images from chronically implanted guinea pigs as part of an ongoing study focused on implant induced fibrosis. Objectively assessing fibrotic burden in this model, with high resolution and repeatability, presents an obvious use case for computer vision methods. Results: We present the results of several state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models and compare their efficacy for identifying cochlear fibrosis and other relevant annotations, using a new library of manually segmented OCT images. Conclusions: We find that the best performance is achieved by using a modified version of the well-known UNET architecture (which we term 2D-OCT-UNET) that operates on the upscaled OCT input resolution. Significance: For the first time, we have successfully applied computer vision techniques to an OCT dataset of implanted cochleae with fibrosis. Using this deep learning model, the cochlear fibrotic burden calculation can be reliably carried out as we verify in our experimental section. The dataset and the project code are available at: https://github.com/juliadietlmeier/CF-OCT-segmentation