Deformable registration of macular oct using a-mode scan similarity

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) of the macular cube has become an increasingly important tool for investigating and managing retinal pathology. One important new area of investigation is the analysis of anatomic variably across a population. Such an analysis on the retina requires the construction of a normalized space, which is generally created through deformable registration of each subject into a common template. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art 3D registration tools fail to adequately spatially normalize retinal OCT images. This work proposes a new deformable registration algorithm for OCT images using the similarity between pairs of A-mode scans. First, a retinal OCT specific affine step is presented, which uses automated landmarks to perform global translations and individual rescaling of all the subject's Amode scans. Then, a deformable registration using regularized one-dimensional radial basis functions is applied to further align the retinal layers. Results on 15 subjects show the improved accuracy of this approach in comparison to state of the art methods with respect to registration for labeling. Additional results show the ability to generate stereotaxic spaces for retinal OCT.