Automatic detection of subretinal fluid and sub-retinal pigment epithelium fluid in optical coherence tomography images

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2013:2013:7388-91. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2013.6611265.

Abstract

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of blindness in developed countries. Subretinal fluid (SRF) and sub-retinal pigment epithelium (sub-RPE) fluid are signs of AMD and can be detected in optical coherence tomography images. However, manual detection and segmentation of SRFs and sub-RPE fluids are laborious and time consuming. In this paper, a novel pipeline is proposed for automatic detection of SRFs and sub-RPE fluids. First, top and bottom layers of retina are segmented using a graph cut method. Then, a Split Bregman-based segmentation method is used to segment dark regions between layers. These segmented regions are considered as potential fluid candidates, on which a set of features are generated. After that, a random forest classifier is trained to distinguish between the true fluid regions from the falsely detected fluid regions. This method shows reasonable performance in a leave-one-out evaluation using a dataset from 21 patients.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Body Fluids
  • False Positive Reactions
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Macular Degeneration / diagnosis*
  • Macular Degeneration / pathology*
  • Observer Variation
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Retina / pathology*
  • Retinal Pigment Epithelium / pathology*
  • Signal-To-Noise Ratio
  • Subretinal Fluid*
  • Tomography, Optical Coherence / methods*