The present project aims at developing a fully automatic software for estimation of the waist of the nerve fiber layer in the Optic Nerve Head (ONH) angularly resolved in the frontal plane as a tool for morphometric monitoring of glaucoma. The waist of the nerve fiber layer is here defined as Pigment epithelium central limit –Inner limit of the retina – Minimal Distance, (PIMD). 3D representations of the ONH were collected with high resolution OCT in young not glaucomatous eyes and glaucomatous eyes. An improved tool for manual annotation was developed in Python. This tool was found user friendly and to provide sufficiently precise manual annotation. PIMD was automatically estimated with a software consisting of one AI model for detection of the inner limit of the retina and another AI model for localization of the Optic nerve head Pigment epithelium Central limit (OPCL). In the current project, the AI model for OPCL localization was retrained with new data manually annotated with the improved tool for manual annotation both in not glaucomatous eyes and in glaucomatous eyes. Finally, automatic annotations were compared to 3 annotations made by 3 independent annotators in an independent subset of both the not glaucomatous and the glaucomatous eyes. It was found that the fully automatic estimation of PIMD-angle overlapped the 3 manual annotators with small variation among the manual annotators. Considering interobserver variation, the improved tool for manual annotation provided less variation than our original annotation tool in not glaucomatous eyes suggesting that variation in glaucomatous eyes is due to variable pathological anatomy, difficult to annotate without error. The small relative variation in relation to the substantial overall loss of PIMD in the glaucomatous eyes compared to the not glaucomatous eyes suggests that our software for fully automatic estimation of PIMD-angle can now be implemented clinically for monitoring of glaucoma progression.
In MRI neuroimaging, the shimming procedure is used before image acquisition to correct for inhomogeneity of the static magnetic field within the brain. To correctly adjust the field, the brain’s location and edges must first be identified from quickly-acquired low resolution data. This process is currently carried out manually by an operator, which can be time-consuming and not always accurate. In this work, we implement a quick and automatic technique for brain segmentation to be potentially used during the shimming. Our method is based on two main steps. First, a random forest classifier is used to get a preliminary segmentation from an input MRI image. Subsequently, a statistical shape model of the brain, which was previously generated from ground-truth segmentations, is fitted to the output of the classifier to obtain a model-based segmentation mask. In this way, a-priori knowledge on the brain’s shape is included in the segmentation pipeline. The proposed methodology was tested on low resolution images of rat brains and further validated on rabbit brain images of higher resolution. Our results suggest that the present method is promising for the desired purpose in terms of time efficiency, segmentation accuracy and repeatability. Moreover, the use of shape modeling was shown to be particularly useful when handling low-resolution data, which could lead to erroneous classifications when using only machine learning-based methods.
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