Incorporation of gradient vector flow field in a multimodal graph-theoretic approach for segmenting the internal limiting membrane from glaucomatous optic nerve head-centered SD-OCT volumes

Abstract

The internal limiting membrane (ILM) separates the retina and optic nerve head (ONH) from the vitreous. In the optical coherence tomography volumes of glaucoma patients, while current approaches for the segmentation of the ILM in the peripapillary and macular regions are considered robust, current approaches commonly produce ILM segmentation errors at the ONH due to the presence of blood vessels and/or characteristic glaucomatous deep cupping. Because a precise segmentation of the ILM surface at the ONH is required for computing several newer structural measurements including Bruch's membrane opening-minimum rim width (BMO-MRW) and cup volume, in this study, we propose a multimodal multiresolution graph-based method to precisely segment the ILM surface within ONH-centered spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) volumes. In particular, the gradient vector flow (GVF) field, which is computed from a multiresolution initial segmentation, is employed for calculating a set of non-overlapping GVF-based columns perpendicular to the initial segmentation. The GVF columns are utilized to resample the volume and also serve as the columns to the graph construction. The ILM surface in the resampled volume is fairly smooth and does not contain the steep slopes. This prior shape knowledge along with the blood vessel information, obtained from registered fundus photographs, are incorporated in a graph-theoretic approach in order to identify the location of the ILM surface. The proposed method is tested on the SD-OCT volumes of 44 subjects with various stages of glaucoma and significantly smaller segmentation errors were obtained than that of current approaches.