title: Automatic detection of cone photoreceptors in split detector adaptive optics scanning light ophthalmoscope images.
abstract: Quantitative analysis of the cone photoreceptor mosaic in the living retina is potentially useful for early diagnosis and prognosis of many ocular diseases. Non-confocal split detector based adaptive optics scanning light ophthalmoscope (AOSLO) imaging reveals the cone photoreceptor inner segment mosaics often not visualized on confocal AOSLO imaging. Despite recent advances in automated cone segmentation algorithms for confocal AOSLO imagery, quantitative analysis of split detector AOSLO images is currently a time-consuming manual process. In this paper, we present the fully automatic adaptive filtering and local detection (AFLD) method for detecting cones in split detector AOSLO images. We validated our algorithm on 80 images from 10 subjects, showing an overall mean Dice's coefficient of 0.95 (standard deviation 0.03), when comparing our AFLD algorithm to an expert grader. This is comparable to the inter-observer Dice's coefficient of 0.94 (standard deviation 0.04). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first validated, fully-automated segmentation method which has been applied to split detector AOSLO images.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cunefare
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, 53233, USA.
authors.forename: Robert F
authors.initials: RF
authors.lastname: Cooper
authors.affiliation: Department of Ophthalmology, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, 53226, USA.
authors.forename: Brian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Higgins
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA.
authors.forename: David F
authors.initials: DF
authors.lastname: Katz
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, 53233, USA; Department of Ophthalmology, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, 53226, USA.
authors.forename: Alfredo
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dubra
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, 53233, USA; Department of Ophthalmology, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, 53226, USA.
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Carroll
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA; Department of Ophthalmology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, 27710, USA.
authors.forename: Sina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Farsiu
keywords: (100.0100) Image processing; (110.1080) Active or adaptive optics; (170.4470) Ophthalmology