Automated layer segmentation of 3D macular images using hybrid methods

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.Spectral-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography (SD-OCT) is a non-invasive imaging modality, which provides retinal structures with unprecedented detail in 3D. In this paper, we propose an automated segmentation method to detect intra-retinal layers in OCT images acquired from a high resolution SD-OCT Spectralis HRA+OCT (Heidelberg Engineering, Germany). The algorithm starts by removing all the OCT imaging artifects includes the speckle noise and enhancing the contrast between layers using both 3D nonlinear anisotropic and ellipsoid averaging filers. Eight boundaries of the retinal are detected by using a hybrid method which combines hysteresis thresholding method, level set method, multi-region continuous max-flow approaches. The segmentation results show that our method can effectively locate 8 surfaces for varying quality 3D macular images.