Abstract
Modern optical coherence tomography (OCT) devices used in ophthalmology acquire steadily increasing amounts of imaging data. Thus, reliable automated quantitative analysis of OCT images is considered to be of utmost importance. Current automated retinal OCT layer segmentation methods work reliably on healthy or mildly diseased retinas, but struggle with the complex interaction of the layers with fluid accumulations in macular edema. In this work, we present a fully automated 3D method which is able to segment all the retinal layers and fluid-filled regions simultaneously, exploiting their mutual interaction to improve the overall segmentation results. The machine learning based method combines unsupervised feature representation and heterogeneous spatial context with a graph-theoretic surface segmentation. The method was extensively evaluated on manual annotations of 20,000 OCT B-scans from 100 scans of patients and on a publicly available data set consisting of 110 annotated B-scans from 10 patients, all with severe macular edema, yielding an overall mean Dice coefficient of 0.76 and 0.78, respectively.
Highlights
Macular edema is a swelling or thickening of the macula, the area of the retina responsible for central vision
Modern optical coherence tomography (OCT) devices used in ophthalmology acquire steadily increasing amounts of imaging data
The method was extensively evaluated on manual annotations of 20,000 OCT B-scans from 100 scans of patients and on a publicly available data set consisting of 110 annotated B-scans from 10 patients, all with severe macular edema, yielding an overall mean Dice coefficient of 0.76 and 0.78, respectively
Summary
Macular edema is a swelling or thickening of the macula, the area of the retina responsible for central vision. An example of an optical coherence tomography (OCT) slice of a retina with macular edema is shown, with IRF depicted in white and SRF depicted in blue. Recent studies have shown that individual retinal morphology has predictive value for treatment requirements and prognosis, which could lead the way to personalized treatment regimes, reducing the burden on patients and the health care system [5, 6]. This highlights the need for robust and sensitive quantitative imaging biomarkers, on which treatment decisions could be reliably based
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