Retinal Layer Segmentation in Optical Coherence Tomography Images

Abstract

The four major causes of blindness are age-related diseases, out of which three affects the retina. These diseases, i.e., glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and age-related macular degeneration, require life-long treatment and cause irreversible blindness. Conversely, early diagnosis has been shown to curtail or prevent blindness and visual impairments. A critical element of the clinical diagnosis is the analysis of individual retinal layer properties, as the manifestation of the dominant eye diseases has been shown to correlate with structural changes to the retinal layers. Regrettably, manual segmentation is dependent on the ophthalmologist's level of expertise, and currently becoming impractical due to advancement in imaging modalities. Inherently, much research on computer-aided diagnostic methods is conducted to aid in extracting useful layer information from these images, which were inaccessible without these techniques. However, speckle noise and intensity inhomogeneity remain a challenge with a detrimental effect on the performance of automated methods. In this paper, we propose a method comprising of fuzzy image processing techniques and graph-cut methods to robustly segment optical coherence tomography (OCT) into five (5) distinct layers. Notably, the method establishes a specific region of interest to suppress the interference of speckle noise, while Fuzzy C-means is utilized to build data terms for better integration into the continuous max-flow to handle inhomogeneity. The method is evaluated on 225 OCT B-scan images, and promising experimental results were achieved. The method will allow for early diagnosis of major eye diseases by providing the basic, yet critical layer information necessary for an effective eye examination.