Robust segmentation of intraretinal layers in the normal human fovea using a novel statistical model based on texture and shape analysis

A novel statistical model based on texture and shape for fully automatic intraretinal layer segmentation of normal retinal tomograms obtained by a commercial 800nm optical coherence tomography (OCT) system is developed. While existing algorithms often fail dramatically due to strong speckle noise, non-optimal imaging conditions, shadows and other artefacts, the novel algorithm’s accuracy only slowly deteriorates when progressively increasing segmentation task difficulty. Evaluation against a large set of manual segmentations shows unprecedented robustness, even in the presence of additional strong speckle noise, with dynamic range tested down to 12dB, enabling segmentation of almost all intraretinal layers in cases previously inaccessible to the existing algorithms. For the first time, an error measure is computed from a large, representative manually segmented data set (466 B-scans from 17 eyes, segmented twice by different operators) and compared to the automatic segmentation with a difference of only 2.6% against the inter-observer variability.