Affiliations: [a] Physics Department, University of Patras, Patras, Greece | [b] Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of West Attica, Athens, Greece | [c] School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece | [d] Athens Vision Eye Institute, Athens, Greece
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Pantelis A. Asvestas, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of West Attica, Agiou Spyridonos Street, 122 43 Egaleo Athens, Greece. Tel.: +30 2105385375; E-mail: pasv@uniwa.gr.
Abstract: Macular diseases, including neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nvAMD), are leading causes of irreversible blindness and visual impairment. One prominent feature of nvAMD is the detachment of the retinal pigment epithelium. The aim of this study is to implement an automated method for the segmentation of the pigment epithelial detachment (PED) using optical coherence tomography (OCT). OCT datasets from 8 patients with nvAMD were acquired during multiple sessions. At each session, 17 images with a resolution of 1020 × 640 pixels were obtained. The images were segmented using Gaussian filtering and template matching for the detection of the upper and lower border of the PED, respectively. The results of the method were compared with the ones obtained from the manual segmentation of the images by an expert. Four well-known metrics were used to evaluate the performance of the method with respect to the manual segmentation, resulting in high scores of consistency. Furthermore, the proposed method was also compared with four other well-known methods providing similar or superior performance.
