title: Automated choroidal segmentation of 1060 nm OCT in healthy and pathologic eyes using a statistical model.
abstract: A two stage statistical model based on texture and shape for fully automatic choroidal segmentation of normal and pathologic eyes obtained by a 1060 nm optical coherence tomography (OCT) system is developed. A novel dynamic programming approach is implemented to determine location of the retinal pigment epithelium/ Bruch's membrane /choriocapillaris (RBC) boundary. The choroid-sclera interface (CSI) is segmented using a statistical model. The algorithm is robust even in presence of speckle noise, low signal (thick choroid), retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) detachments and atrophy, drusen, shadowing and other artifacts. Evaluation against a set of 871 manually segmented cross-sectional scans from 12 eyes achieves an average error rate of 13%, computed per tomogram as a ratio of incorrectly classified pixels and the total layer surface. For the first time a fully automatic choroidal segmentation algorithm is successfully applied to a wide range of clinical volumetric OCT data.
authors.affiliation: Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University Vienna, General Hospital Vienna 4L, Waehringer Guertel 18-20, A-1090 Vienna, Austria. kajicv1@cf.ac.uk
authors.forename: Vedran
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Kajić
authors.forename: Marieh
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Esmaeelpour
authors.forename: Boris
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Považay
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Marshall
authors.forename: Paul L
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Rosin
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Drexler