Three-dimensional segmentation and reconstruction of the retinal vasculature from spectral-domain optical coherence tomography

Abstract

We reconstruct the three-dimensional shape and location of the retinal vascular network from commercial spectral-domain (SD) optical coherence tomography (OCT) data. The two-dimensional location of retinal vascular network on the eye fundus is obtained through support vector machines classification of properly defined fundus images from OCT data, taking advantage of the fact that on standard SD-OCT, the incident light beam is absorbed by hemoglobin, creating a shadow on the OCT signal below each perfused vessel. The depth-wise location of the vessel is obtained as the beginning of the shadow. The classification of crossovers and bifurcations within the vascular network is also addressed. We illustrate the feasibility of the method in terms of vessel caliber estimation and the accuracy of bifurcations and crossovers classification.