title: Automatic retinal vessel segmentation based on active contours method in Doppler spectral-domain optical coherence tomography.
abstract: We achieved fast and automatic retinal vessel segmentation by employing the active contours method in Doppler spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). In a typical OCT B-scan image, we first extracted the phase variations between adjacent A-lines and removed bulk motion. Then we set the initial contour as the boundary of the whole image and iterated until all of the segmented vessel contours became stabilized. Using a typical office computer, the whole segmentation took no more than 50 s, making real-time retinal vessel segmentation possible. We tested the active contours method segmentation in both controlled phantom and in vivo rodent eye images.
authors.affiliation: Northwestern University, Department of Biomedical Engineering, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA.
authors.forename: Wenzhong
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Tan
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Song
authors.forename: Ji
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yi
authors.forename: Hao F
authors.initials: HF
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D051381:Rats; D012171:Retinal Vessels / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D041623:Tomography, Optical Coherence / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*