Locally-adaptive loosely-coupled level sets for retinal layer and fluid segmentation in subjects with central serous retinopathy

Abstract

We present a locally-adaptive approach to segment the fluid and the interfaces between retinal layers in eyes affected by central serous retinopathy based on loosely-coupled level sets. The approach exploits the local attenuation coefficient differences of layers around an interface and introduces auxiliary interfaces to delineate the fluid. Thus, it can handle abrupt attenuation coefficient variations and topology-disrupting anomalies. The method was applied to in-vivo images of retinas acquired by optical coherence tomography. A quantitative comparison with manual annotations shows the method's high accuracy: we obtained a mean absolute deviation for the interfaces of 3.7-8.9 βm (1-2 pixels) and a Dice coefficient for the fluid segmentation of 0.96.