Non-rigid registration of Fluorescein Angiography and Optical Coherence Tomography via scanning laser ophthalmoscope imaging.

Abstract

Fluorescein Angiography (FA) imaging is the gold standard technique for neurovascular imaging regarding assessing neurovascular diseases such as Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) and Diabetic Macular Edema (DME). On the other hand, as FA imaging is invasive and does not provide any depth information, Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) imaging technique is a good complementary for it in diagnosis process. To correlate the information of both FA and OCT images, an image alignment/registration process is needed. In absence of an automatic registration software, the clinician should do intuitive comparison to integrate these data which is a subjective and time consuming process. In this paper, we demonstrate a non-rigid registration method called multi-step correlation-based registration algorithm to automatically register FA and OCT images together. Our algorithm consists of two steps including rigid/global and non-rigid/local registration. We evaluate our algorithm's performance by labeling Micro-Aneurysm (MA) spots -hallmarks of DR- on FA images and determining MA regions on OCT B-scans after registration. Our Results show that our algorithm performs accurately regarding registration of FA images and OCT B-scans.