Optical coherence tomography (OCT), being a noninvasive imaging modality, has begun to find vast use in the diagnosis and management of retinal diseases. These high-resolution images of the retina allow structural changes to be detected and tracked. For instance, in glaucoma, the retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) has been known to thin. The recent availability of the considerably larger volumetric data from the spectral-domain OCT scanners has further increased the need for new processing techniques. This body of work is centered around an automated 3-D graph-theoretic approach for the segmentation of 7 surfaces (6 layers) of the retina from 3-D spectral-domain OCT images centered on the optic nerve head (ONH). The multiple surfaces are detected through the computation of a minimum-cost closed set in a vertex-weighted graph constructed using edge/regional information, and subject to a priori determined varying surface interaction and smoothness constraints. The method also addresses the challenges posed by presence of the neural canal and the large blood vessels found at the ONH. The method was used to study RNFL thickness maps of normal and glaucomatous eyes, which showed average thicknesses of 73.72 +/- 32.72um and 60.38 +/- 25.22um (p < 0.01), respectively.

Currently available methods for managing glaucoma, e.g. the planimetry on stereo disc photographs, involve a subjective component either by the patient or examiner. In addition, a few structures may overlap together on the essential 2-D images, which can decrease reproducibility. Spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) provides a 3-D, cross-sectional, microscale depiction of biological tissues. Given the wealth of volumetric information at microscale resolution available with SD-OCT, it is likely that better parameters can be obtained for measuring glaucoma changes that move beyond what is possible using fundus photography etc. The neural canal opening (NCO) is a 3-D single anatomic structure in SD-OCT volumes. It is proposed as a basis for a stable reference plane from which various optic nerve morphometric parameters can be derived. The overall aim of this Ph.D. project is to develop a framework to segment the 3-D NCO and its related structure retinal vessels using information from SD-OCT volumes and/or fundus photographs to aid the management of glaucoma changes. Based on the mutual positional relationship of the NCO and vessels, a multimodal 3-D scale-learning-based framework is developed to iteratively identify them in SD-OCT volumes by incorporating each other's pre-identified positional information. The algorithm first applies a 3-D wavelet-transform-learning-based layer segmentation and pre-segments the NCO using graph search. To aid a better NCO detection, the vessels are identified either using a SD-OCT segmentation approach incorporating the presegmented NCO positional information to the vessel classification or a multimodal approach combining the complementary features from SD-OCT volumes and fundus photographs (or a registered-fundus approach based on the original fundus vessel segmentation). The obtained vessel positional information is then used to help enhance the NCO segmentation by incorporating that to the cost function of graph search. Note that the 3-D wavelet transform via lifting scheme has been used to remove high frequency noises and extract texture properties in SD-OCT volumes etc. The graph search has been used for finding the optimal solution of 3-D multiple surfaces using edge and additionally regional information. In this work, the use of the 3-D wavelet-transform-learning-based cost function for the graph search is a further extension of the 3-D wavelet transform and graph search. The major contributions of this work include: 1) extending the 3-D graph theoretic segmentation to the use of 3-D scale-learning-based cost function, 2) developing a graph theoretic approach for segmenting the NCO in SD-OCT volumes, 3) developing a 3-D wavelet-transform-learning-based graph theoretic approach for segmenting the NCO in SD-OCT volumes by iteratively utilizing the pre-identified NCO and vessel positional information (from 4 or 5), 4) developing a vessel classification approach in SD-OCT volumes by incorporating the pre-segmented NCO positional information to the vessel classification to suppress the NCO false positives, and 5) developing a multimodal concurrent classification and a registered-fundus approach for better identifying vessels in SD-OCT volumes using additional fundus information.