A New Texture-Based Labeling Framework for Hyper-Reflective Foci Identification in Retinal Optical Coherence Tomography Images Publisher Pubmed

Summary: New method identifies hyper-reflective foci in OCT images, aiding early detection of retinal diseases like AMD. #EyeHealth #RetinalImaging

Monemian M¹ ; Daneshmand PG¹ ; Rakhshani S¹ ; Rabbani H¹
Source: Scientific Reports Published:2024

Abstract

An important abnormality in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images is Hyper-Reflective Foci (HRF). This anomaly can be interpreted as a biomarker of serious retinal diseases such as Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) and Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) or the progression of disease from an early stage to a late one. In this paper, a new method is proposed for the identification of HRFs. The new method divides the OCT B-scan into patches and separately verifies each patch to determine whether or not the patch contains an HRF. The procedure of patch verification contains a texture-based framework which assigns appropriate labels according to intensity changes to each column and row. Then, a feature vector is extracted for each patch based on the assigned labels. The feature vectors are utilized in the training step of well-known classifiers like Support Vector Machine (SVM). Then, the classifiers are used to produce the labels for the test OCT images. The new method is evaluated on a public dataset including HRF labels. The experimental results show that the new method is capable of providing outstanding results in terms of speed and accuracy. © The Author(s) 2024.