3D automatic segmentation method for retinal optical coherence tomography volume data using boundary surface enhancement

Abstract

With the introduction of spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT), much larger image datasets are routinely acquired compared to what was possible using the previous generation of time-domain OCT. Thus, there is a critical need for the development of three-dimensional (3D) segmentation methods for processing these data. We present here a novel 3D automatic segmentation method for retinal OCT volume data. Briefly, to segment a boundary surface, two OCT volume datasets are obtained by using a 3D smoothing filter and a 3D differential filter. Their linear combination is then calculated to generate new volume data with an enhanced boundary surface, where pixel intensity, boundary position information, and intensity changes on both sides of the boundary surface are used simultaneously. Next, preliminary discrete boundary points are detected from the A-Scans of the volume data. Finally, surface smoothness constraints and a dynamic threshold are applied to obtain a smoothed boundary surface by correcting a small number of error points. Our method can extract retinal layer boundary surfaces sequentially with a decreasing search region of volume data. We performed automatic segmentation on eight human OCT volume datasets acquired from a commercial Spectralis OCT system, where each volume of datasets contains 97 OCT B-Scan images with a resolution of 496×512 (each B-Scan comprising 512 A-Scans containing 496 pixels); experimental results show that this method can accurately segment seven layer boundary surfaces in normal as well as some abnormal eyes.