Correcting motion artifacts in retinal spectral domain optical coherence tomography via image registration

Abstract

Spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) is an important tool for the diagnosis of various retinal diseases. The measurements available from SD-OCT volumes can be used to detect structural changes in glaucoma patients before the resulting vision loss becomes noticeable. Eye movement during the imaging process corrupts the data, making measurements unreliable. We propose a method to correct for transverse motion artifacts in SD-OCT volumes after scan acquisition by registering the volume to an instantaneous, and therefore artifact-free, reference image. Our procedure corrects for smooth deformations resulting from ocular tremor and drift as well as the abrupt discontinuities in vessels resulting from microsaccades. We test our performance on 48 scans of healthy eyes and 116 scans of glaucomatous eyes, improving scan quality in 96% of healthy and 73% of glaucomatous eyes. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.