Robust multimodal registration of fluorescein angiography and optical coherence tomography angiography images using evolutionary algorithms

Abstract

Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) and fluorescein angiography (FA) are two different vascular imaging modalities widely used in clinical practice to diagnose and grade different relevant retinal pathologies. Although each of them has its advantages and disadvantages, the joint analysis of the images produced by both techniques to analyze a specific area of the retina is of increasing interest, given that they provide common and complementary visual information. However, in order to facilitate this analysis task, a previous registration of the pair of FA and OCTA images is desirable in order to superimpose their common areas and focus the gaze on the regions of interest. Normally, this task is manually carried out by the expert clinician, but it turns out to be tedious and time-consuming. Here, we present a three-stage methodology for robust multimodal registration of FA and superficial plexus OCTA images. The first one is a preprocessing stage devoted to reducing the noise and segmenting the main vessels in both types of images. The second stage uses the vessel information to do an approximate registration based on template matching. Lastly, the third stage uses an evolutionary algorithm based on differential evolution to refine the previous registration and obtain the optimal registration. The method was evaluated in a dataset with 172 pairs of FA and OCTA images, obtaining a success rate of 98.8%. The best mean execution time of the method was less than 5 s per image.