Abstract-In this paper we present a method for volumetric segmentation of retinal vessels based on 3D OCT images of human macula. The proposed hybrid method is comprised of two steps: detailed extraction of superficial blood vessels indicators visible in 2D projection of retina layers followed by an axial inspection of inner retina to determine exact depth position of each vessel. The segmentation procedure is improved by application of block-matching and 4D filtering (BM4D) algorithm for noise reduction. The 3D reconstruction of vascular structure was performed for 10 normal subjects examined with Avanti AngioVue OCT device. The automated segmentation results were validated against the manual segmentation performed by an expert giving the accuracy of 95.2%.
Abstract. This paper presents analysis of selected noise reduction methods used in optical coherence tomography (OCT) retina images (the socalled B-scans). The tested algorithms include median and averaging filtering, anisotropic diffusion, soft wavelet thresholding, and multiframe wavelet thresholding. Precision of the denoising process was evaluated based on the results of automated retina layers segmentation, since this stage (vital for ophthalmic diagnosis) is strongly dependent on the image quality. Experiments were conducted with a set of 3D low quality scans obtained from 10 healthy patients and 10 patients with vitreoretinal pathologies. Influence of each method on the automatic image segmentation for both groups of patients is thoroughly described. Manual annotations of investigated retina layers provided by ophthalmology experts served as reference data for evaluation of the segmentation algorithm.
This paper proposes an efficient segmentation of the preretinal area between the inner limiting membrane (ILM) and posterior cortical vitreous (PCV) of the human eye in an image obtained with the use of optical coherence tomography (OCT). The research was carried out using a database of three-dimensional OCT imaging scans obtained with the Optovue RTVue XR Avanti device. Various types of neural networks (UNet, Attention UNet, ReLayNet, LFUNet) were tested for semantic segmentation, their effectiveness was assessed using the Dice coefficient and compared to the graph theory techniques. Improvement in segmentation efficiency was achieved through the use of relative distance maps. We also show that selecting a larger kernel size for convolutional layers can improve segmentation quality depending on the neural network model. In the case of PVC, we obtain the effectiveness reaching up to 96.35%. The proposed solution can be widely used to diagnose vitreomacular traction changes, which is not yet available in scientific or commercial OCT imaging solutions.
This paper presents signal processing aspects for automatic segmentation of retinal layers of the human eye. The paper draws attention to the problems that occur during the computer image processing of images obtained with the use of the Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography (SD OCT). Accuracy of the retinal layer segmentation for a set of typical 3D scans with a rather low quality was shown. Some possible ways to improve quality of the final results are pointed out. The experimental studies were performed using the so-called B-scans obtained with the OCT Copernicus HR device.
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