Proceedings Article | 20 February 2009
Proc. SPIE. 7171, Multimodal Biomedical Imaging IV
KEYWORDS: Signal to noise ratio, Eye, Edge detection, Nerve, Optical coherence tomography, Retina, Head, Image quality, Optic nerve, Biomedical engineering
Retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness, a measure of glaucoma progression, can be measured in images acquired
by spectral domain optical coherence tomography (OCT). The accuracy of RNFL thickness estimation, however, is
affected by the quality of the OCT images. In this paper, a new parameter, signal deviation (SD), which is based on the
standard deviation of the intensities in OCT images, is introduced for objective assessment of OCT image quality. Two
other objective assessment parameters, signal to noise ratio (SNR) and signal strength (SS), are also calculated for each
OCT image. The results of the objective assessment are compared with subjective assessment. In the subjective
assessment, one OCT expert graded the image quality according to a three-level scale (good, fair, and poor). The OCT
B-scan images of the retina from six subjects are evaluated by both objective and subjective assessment. From the
comparison, we demonstrate that the objective assessment successfully differentiates between the acceptable quality
images (good and fair images) and poor quality OCT images as graded by OCT experts. We evaluate the performance
of the objective assessment under different quality assessment parameters and demonstrate that SD is the best at
distinguishing between fair and good quality images. The accuracy of RNFL thickness estimation is improved
significantly after poor quality OCT images are rejected by automated objective assessment using the SD, SNR, and
SS.
