Abstract
Currently, optical coherence tomography is one of the most used medical imaging modalities, offering cross-sectional representations of the studied tissues. This image modality is specially relevant for the analysis of the retina, since it is the internal part of the human body that allows an almost direct examination without invasive techniques. One of the most representative cases of use of this medical imaging modality is for the identification and characterization of intraretinal fluid accumulations, critical for the diagnosis of one of the main causes of blindness in developed countries: the Diabetic Macular Edema. The study of these fluid accumulations is particularly interesting, both from the point of view of pattern recognition and from the different branches of health sciences. As these fluid accumulations are intermingled with retinal tissues, they present numerous variants according to their severity, and change their appearance depending on the configuration of the device; they are a perfect subject for an in-depth research, as they are considered to be a problem without a strict solution. In this work, we propose a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the patterns that characterize them. We employed a pool of 11 different texture and intensity feature families (giving a total of 510 markers) which we have analyzed using three different feature selection strategies and seven complementary classification algorithms. By doing so, we have been able to narrow down and explain the factors affecting this kind of accumulations and tissue lesions by means of machine learning techniques with a pipeline specially designed for this purpose.
Highlights
The study of the retina represents one of the main approaches to the non-invasive study of the human body
These accumulations, which are the result of diseases considered the main causes of blindness in developed countries, present a wide range of patterns; either due to artifacts produced by the capturing device or complications of the pathology
Methodologies have been proposed in the state of the art to address this problem, but either they do not offer results that are explainable to experts or the design may result in missing real pathological fluid accumulations
Summary
The study of the retina represents one of the main approaches to the non-invasive study of the human body. The study presented in this paper addresses the analysis of retinal structures affected by pathological fluid accumulations Nowadays, pathologies such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) [21] or diabetic macular edema (DME) [22, 40] represent one of the main causes of blindness in developed countries, both as a consequence of consumer habits and the aging of the human population. Pathologies such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) [21] or diabetic macular edema (DME) [22, 40] represent one of the main causes of blindness in developed countries, both as a consequence of consumer habits and the aging of the human population These pathologies trigger a degeneration of the delicate retinal tissues that causes the progressive appearance (either by leakage from the damaged arterio-venous structures or by degradation of the natural filtering mechanisms of the retinal tissues) of intraretinal fluid accumulations. The upper one, with cystic bodies; the intermediate one, with fluid intermixed with retinal tissues with a spongiform texture; and the lower one, a detachment of the lower retinal layers near the central point of vision (the fovea)
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