3D optical coherence tomography super pixel with machine classifier analysis for glaucoma detection

Current standard quantitative 3D spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) analyses of various ocular diseases is limited in detecting structural damage at early pathologic stages. This is mostly because only a small fraction of the 3D data is used in the current method of quantifying the structure of interest. This paper presents a novel SD-OCT data analysis technique, taking full advantage of the 3D dataset. The proposed algorithm uses machine classifier to analyze SD-OCT images after grouping adjacent pixels into super pixel in order to detect glaucomatous damage. A 3D SD-OCT image is first converted into a 2D feature map and partitioned into over a hundred super pixels. Machine classifier analysis using boosting algorithm is performed on super pixel features. One hundred and ninety-two 3D OCT images of the optic nerve head region were tested. Area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUC) was computed to evaluate the glaucoma discrimination performance of the algorithm and compare it to the commercial software output. The AUC of normal vs glaucoma suspect eyes using the proposed method was statistically significantly higher than the current method (0.855 and 0.707, respectively, p=0.031). This new method has the potential to improve early detection of glaucomatous structural damages.