Research Article - Biomedical Research (2018) Volume 29, Issue 0

Automated sub-retinal fluid detection comprising RPE-region using neighbouring pixel connectivity paradigm

Sub-Retinal Fluid (SRF), a categorized retinal fluid accumulation just above the Inner Hyper-Reflective Layer (HRL) of the RPE-Region has a significant correlation with visual acuity. Sub-Retinal Fluid are the indicators of Macular Hole (MH) formations. Early information regarding SRF may help in tackling the chronic cases, as surgery is the only option for treating MH. Proposed is a method to identify Retinal Pigment Epithelium (RPE) region in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) visualization of the retina, further based on it the retinal pathology called as Sub-Retinal Fluid is detected. This paper discusses the newly proposed method for the detection of RPE region, the non-separated region between the inner and outer Hyper-Reflective Layer (HRL). To the best of our knowledge, identification of Sub-Retinal fluid, has never been automated. The work validation is done with the ground truths (manually delineated by an expert panel). Evaluation of the system (RPE-Region detection and SRF Detection) is done independently for both the proposed methods. RPE-region detection was done on 220 images from 23 patients at different orientation styles with 90.45% correct detections whereas the sensitivity and the specificity for the SRF detection is found to be 89.74% and 89.36% respectively over 164 images from 30 patients.

Author(s): Piyush Mishra, Charul Bhatanagar

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