Stochastic Differential Equations for Automatic Quality Control of Retinal Optical Coherence Tomography images.

Optical coherence tomography is widely used to provide high resolution images from retina. During data acquisition, several artifacts may be associated with OCT images which clearly remove information of retinal layers and degrade the quality of images. Manual assessment of the acquired OCT images is hard and time consuming. Therefore, an automatic quality control step is necessary to detect poor images for next decisions of eliminating them and even re-scanning. In this study, a novel automatic quality control methodology is proposed for early assessment of the OCT images quality by employing stochastic differential equations (SDE). In this method α-stable nature of OCT images is represented by applying a fractional Laplacian filter and parameters of the obtained α-stable are fed to an SVM to automatically detect high quality vs poor quality images. The simulation results on a large dataset of normal and abnormal OCT images show that proposed method has outstanding performance in detection of poor vs high quality images. The methodology is applicable to the image quality assessment of other OCT scanning devices as well. Clinical Relevance- Automatic quality control assessment of retinal OCT images provides reliable data for diagnosis of retinal and systematic diseases in clinical applications.

Mixture of Symmetric Stable Distributions for Macular Pathology Detection in Optical Coherence Tomography Scans.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is widely used to detect retinal disorders. In this study a new methodology is proposed for automatic detection of macular pathologies in the OCT images. Our approach is based on modeling the normal and abnormal OCT images with α-stable mixture model represented by stochastic differential equations (SDE). Parameters of the model are used to detect abnormal OCT images. The α-stable mixture model is created after applying a fractional Laplacian operator to the image and Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is applied to estimate its parameters. The classification of an OCT image as normal or abnormal would be done by training SVM classifier based on estimated parameters of the mixture model. This method is examined for macular abnormality detection such as AMD, DME, and MH and achieve maximum accuracy of 97.8%. Clinical Relevance - This study establishes automatic method for anomaly detection on OCT images and provides fast and accurate OCT interpretation in clinical application.