Local comparison of cup to disc ratio in right and left eyes based on fusion of color fundus images and OCT B-scans

Abstract

Symmetry analysis of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images in right and left eyes can lead to introduction of new biomarkers for early detection of eye diseases. In this study, we investigate the symmetry between two eyes by calculating local cup to disc ratio (CDR) from each B-scan based on fusion of fundus images and OCT B-scans. For this purpose, in the first phase, the OCT data of Optic Nerve Head (ONH) in right and left eyes are aligned by finding the equivalent B-scans of both eyes based on the fovea-ONH axes. Since the fovea-ONH axes in OCT data are not available, at first, left and right fundus images are aligned according to their automatically detected fovea-ONH axes. Then, OCT data are registered to corresponding fundus images based on maximum similarity between en-face OCT data and fundus image in each eye. This two-stage alignment procedure depends on 1) the blood vessels, automatically extracted by Hessian analysis of directional curvelet sub-bands, and 2) the disc contour of ONH in fundus images, detected by Distance Regularized Level Set Evolution (DRLSE) algorithm. In the second phase, in order to calculate the local CDRs, the disc and cup boundaries are extracted from the aligned B-scans in left and right eyes. The disc boundary is limited by Bruch-Membrane opening, and the cup boundary is defined by retinal layer border. Therefore, Inner Limiting Membrane (ILM) and Retinal Pigment Epithelium (RPE) layers are extracted using ridgelet transform to find the disc-edge point and cup-edge point in each B-scan. Finally, the ratio of summed areas of cups to summed areas of discs is calculated in corresponding local regions to find the local CDRs. Using this method, we can also introduce a new index called local volumetric CDR (VCDR) by dividing the volume of cup in a specific region to the corresponding volume of disc extracted from OCT images of ONH. Forty healthy OCT datasets of size 650 × 512 × 128 (acquired from Topcon 3D OCT-1000) and corresponding 1536 × 1612 fundus images were used in this study. In addition to point-by-point comparison of CDRs in equivalent B-scans of aligned OCTs, the CDRs in upper, middle and lower regions were calculated and the maximum symmetry is observed in middle region. In addition, using local VCDR, the symmetry of 3D OCTs of both eyes is analyzed in 24 volumetric sectors.