Automatic identification of pathology-distorted retinal layer boundaries using SD-OCT imaging

Abstract

Objective: We propose an effective automatic method for identification of four retinal layer boundaries from the spectral domain optical coherence tomography images in the presence and absence of pathologies and morphological changes due to disease. Methods: The approach first finds an approximate location of three reference layers and then uses these to bound the search space for the actual layers, which is achieved by modeling the problem as a graph and applying Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. The edge weight between nodes is determined using pixel distance, slope similarity to a reference, and nonassociativity of the layers, which is designed to overcome the distorting effects that pa..