Automated measurement of the minimum macular hole diameter based on optical coherence tomography images
摘要
Accurate measurement of minimum macular hole (MH) diameter is essential for diagnosis and treatment. The manual measurement approach by ophthalmologists is time-consuming, poorly reproducible, and exhibits high inter-observer variability. Threshold-based methods are sensitive to image quality, and perform inadequately in low-contrast optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. Deep learning can achieve higher measurement accuracy but shows limited generalization capability.
MethodsWe propose an automated measurement method comprising three sub-tasks. Specifically, a tailored MH dataset is first created by cropping publicly available OCT images to minimize interference from non-MH regions. Subsequently, an image processing pipeline, which consists of denoising, binarization, morphological operations, and edge detection, is implemented to extract the contours on both sides of MH. Finally, an automated measurement algorithm is designed to locate the closest points on the bilateral contours of MH and thereby calculate the minimum diameter.
ResultsExtensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of this research. More concretely, on the public dataset, the
Overall, the comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experimental results confirm the method’s commendable accuracy and execution efficiency in measuring the minimum MH diameter, demonstrating its potential value in assisting ophthalmologists with the diagnosis and treatment assessment of MH conditions.