@inproceedings {245, title = {A cellular automata based semi-automatic algorithm for segmentation of choroidal blood vessels from ultrahigh resolution optical coherence images of rat retina}, booktitle = {23rd Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE)}, year = {2010}, month = {06/2010}, address = {Calgary, Alberta, Canada}, abstract = {

Abnormal changes in choroidal blood flow have been linked to various retinal diseases, such as Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) and Age related Macular Degeneration (AMD), which at later stages can lead to blindness. Therefore non-invasive and precise evaluation of choroidal blood flow can aid the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of retinal disease progression. Doppler Optical Coherence Tomography is an imaging technique capable of measuring blood flow velocity and visualization of retinal and choroidal blood vessles. However accurate assessment of retinal and choroidal blood flow requires precise measurement of the blood vessel thickness. The presence of speckle noise and low image contrast of OCT tomograms makes this task very challenging. This paper proposes a cellular automata based semi-automatic algorithm for the segmentation of choroidal blood vessels. The proposed approach propagates user-defined points in order to identify the vessel boundaries, allowing a thickness profile to be extracted. The performance of the algorithm was tested on a series of retinal images acquired from living rats with a high speed, ultrahigh resolution OCT system (UHROCT). Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides precise thickness profiles even in the suboptimal conditions of low image contrast in the UHROCT images.
Abnormal changes in choroidal blood flow have been linked to various retinal diseases, such as Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) and Age related Macular Degeneration (AMD), which at later stages can lead to blindness. Therefore non-invasive and precise evaluation of choroidal blood flow can aid the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of retinal disease progression. Doppler Optical Coherence Tomography is an imaging technique capable of measuring blood flow velocity and visualization of retinal and choroidal blood vessles. However accurate assessment of retinal and choroidal blood flow requires precise measurement of the blood vessel thickness. The presence of speckle noise and low image contrast of OCT tomograms makes this task very challenging. This paper proposes a cellular automata based semi-automatic algorithm for the segmentation of choroidal blood vessels. The proposed approach propagates user-defined points in order to identify the vessel boundaries, allowing a thickness profile to be extracted. The performance of the algorithm was tested on a series of retinal images acquired from living rats with a high speed, ultrahigh resolution OCT system (UHROCT). Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides precise thickness profiles even in the suboptimal conditions of low image contrast in the UHROCT images.
}, keywords = {age related macular degeneration, cellular automata, choroidal blood flow, choroidal blood vessel segmentation, diabetic retinopathy, Doppler optical coherence tomography, Feature Extraction, image resolution, image segmentation, medical image processing, OCT tomograms, optical tomography, rat retina image, retinal blood flow, retinal disease progression, thickness profile extraction, ultrahigh resolution optical coherence image}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CCECE.2010.5575182}, author = {A Mishra and S Hariri and A Moayed and K Bizheva and P Fieguth and D A. Clausi} } @inproceedings {289, title = {A novel algorithm for extraction of the layers of the cornea}, booktitle = {6th Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision}, year = {2009}, month = {05/2009}, address = {Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada}, abstract = {

Accurate corneal layer boundary extraction from optical coherence tomograms can provide precise layer thickness measurements required in the analysis of corneal disease. This paper establishes a novel approach to precisely obtain the five primary corneal layer boundaries. The proposed method determines correspondence relationships between the layer boundaries to facilitate robust boundary extraction in the presence of noise and artifacts. The first phase of the method applies morphological operators to enhance the prominent structural features of the cornea. The second phase uses a semi-automated segmentation algorithm to extract the upper and lower boundaries of the cornea; these boundaries are used to register the corneal image. The final phase extracts all five boundaries using a global optimization method exploiting the medial correspondence relationship between each layers. The proposed method is tested and verified using a representative set of optical coherence tomography images and compared against several state of the art methods. The proposed method is demonstrated to be more robust to noise, to provide more accurate segmentation results, and to require fewer user interactions than the other published methods.

}, keywords = {corneal disease, corneal image register, corneal layer boundary extraction, diseases, eye, Feature Extraction, global optimization method, image registration, image segmentation, layer thickness measurements, medical image processing, optical coherence tomography, optical tomography, optimisation, semiautomated segmentation algorithm, thickness measurement}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CRV.2009.22}, author = {J A. Eichel and A Mishra and D A. Clausi and P Fieguth} }