Improving microvascular brain analysis with adversarial learning for OCT–TPM vascular domain translation

Modeling microscopic cerebrovascular networks is essential for understanding cerebral blood flow and oxygen transport. High-resolution imaging modalities, such as Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and Two-Photon Microscopy (TPM), are widely used to capture microvascular structure and topology. Although TPM angiography generally provides better localization and image quality than OCT, its use is impractical in studies involving fluorescent dye leakage. Here, we exploit generative adversarial learning to produce high-quality TPM angiographies from OCT vascular stacks. We investigate the use of 2D and 3D cycle generative adversarial networks (CycleGANs) trained on unpaired image samples. We evaluate the generated TPM vascular structures based on image similarity and signal-to-noise ratio. Additionally, we evaluated the generated vascular structures after applying vessel segmentation and extracting their 3D topological models. Our results demonstrate that the 2D adversarial learning model outperforms the 3D model in terms of image quality. However, our statistical comparisons of vascular network features show the 3D model’s consistent superiority in generating vascular structures. Our work provides a complementary approach to enhance vascular analysis when only OCT imaging is available.