Three-dimensional Segmentation of Retinal Cysts from Spectral-domain Optical Coherence Tomography Images by the Use of Three-dimensional Curvelet Based K-SVD

Abstract

This paper presents a new three-dimensional curvelet transform based dictionary learning for automatic segmentation of intraretinalcysts, most relevant prognostic biomarker in neovascular age-related macular degeneration, from 3D spectral-domain optical coherencetomography (SD-OCT) images. In particular, we focus on the Spectralis SD-OCT (Heidelberg Engineering, Heidelberg, Germany) system, andshow the applicability of our algorithm in the segmentation of these features. For this purpose, we use recursive Gaussian filter and approximatethe corrupted pixels from its surrounding, then in order to enhance the cystoid dark space regions and future noise suppression we introduce anew scheme in dictionary learning and take curvelet transform of filtered image then denoise and modify each noisy coefficients matrix in eachscale with predefined initial 3D sparse dictionary. Dark pixels between retinal pigment epithelium and nerve fiber layer that were extracted withgraph theory are considered as cystoid spaces. The average dice coefficient for the segmentation of cystoid regions in whole 3D volume andwith-in central 3 mm diameter on the MICCAI 2015 OPTIMA Cyst Segmentation Challenge dataset were found to be 0.65 and 0.77, respectively.