title: Intra-retinal layer segmentation in optical coherence tomography using an active contour approach.
abstract: Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive, depth resolved imaging modality that has become a prominent ophthalmic diagnostic technique. We present an automatic segmentation algorithm to detect intra-retinal layers in OCT images acquired from rodent models of retinal degeneration. We adapt Chan-Vese's energy-minimizing active contours without edges for OCT images, which suffer from low contrast and are highly corrupted by noise. We adopt a multi-phase framework with a circular shape prior in order to model the boundaries of retinal layers and estimate the shape parameters using least squares. We use a contextual scheme to balance the weight of different terms in the energy functional. The results from various synthetic experiments and segmentation results on 20 OCT images from four rats are presented, demonstrating the strength of our method to detect the desired retinal layers with sufficient accuracy and average Dice similarity coefficient of 0.85, specifically 0.94 for the the ganglion cell layer, which is the relevant layer for glaucoma diagnosis.
authors.affiliation: School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, Canada. aya18@sfu.ca
authors.forename: Azadeh
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Yazdanpanah
authors.forename: Ghassan
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hamarneh
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: Marinko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sarunic
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000166:cytology*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D055351:Retinal Neurons / Q000166:cytology*; D042262:Retinoscopy / Q000379:methods*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity