3D mapping of choroidal thickness from OCT B-scans

Abstract

The choroid is the middle layer of the eye globe located between the retina and the sclera. It is proven that choroidal thickness is a sign of multiple eye diseases. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is an imaging technique that allows the visualization of tomographic images of near surface tissues like those in the eye globe. The automatic calculation of the choroidal thickness reduces the subjectivity of manual image analysis as well as the time of large scale measurements. In this paper, a method for the automatic estimation of the choroidal thickness from OCT images is presented. The pre-processing of the images is focused on noise reduction, shadow removal and contrast adjustment. The inner and outer boundaries of the choroid are delineated sequentially, resorting to a minimum path algorithm supported by new dedicated cost matrices. The choroidal thickness is given by the distance between the two boundaries. The data are then interpolated and mapped to an infrared image of the eye fundus. The method was evaluated by calculating the error as the distance from the automatically estimated boundaries to the boundaries delineated by an ophthalmologist. The error of the automatic segmentation was low and comparable to the differences between manual segmentations from different ophthalmologists.