Automatic retinal vessel segmentation based on active contours method in Doppler spectral-domain optical coherence tomography

Abstract

Abstract. We achieved fast and automatic retinal vessel segmentation by employing the active contours method in Doppler spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). In a typical OCT B-scan image, we first extracted the phase variations between adjacent A-lines and removed bulk motion. Then we set the initial contour as the boundary of the whole image and iterated until all of the segmented vessel contours became stabilized. Using a typical office computer, the whole segmentation took no more than 50 s, making real-time retinal vessel segmentation possible. We tested the active contours method segmentation in both controlled phantom and in vivo rodent eye images.

A combined method to quantify the retinal metabolic rate of oxygen using photoacoustic ophthalmoscopy and optical coherence tomography

“…Figure 3d provides the overall measurements of blood flow velocities in this particular retina, from which we can observe higher velocities in arteries than veins. We also extracted the vessel diameter from SD-OCT phase images using a recently developed automatic segmentation algorithm 40 , with results given in Figure 3e . The vessel diameters are shown in Figure 3e , where the veins have larger diameters than the arteries.…”

In vivo blind‐deconvolution photoacoustic ophthalmoscopy with total variation regularization

“…Since PA waves originating from multiple layers at different depths have different time‐of‐flight before reaching the ultrasonic transducer, the retinal vessels can be distinguished from the choroid because of their distance of around 200 μm . For each PAOM B‐scan image, we manually fitted a curve between the retina and choroid, and set the intensity value of pixels beneath the fitting curve to zero.…”