Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

4913

Date

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Electrical and Computer Engr

Concentration

Computer Engineering

Committee Chair

Madhusudhanan Balasubramanian

Committee Member

Hasan Ali

Committee Member

Aaron Robinson

Abstract

Assessing vascular structure of the retina is useful for diagnosis and management of pathological conditions of the eye such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, vein occlusion and retinal neo-vascularization. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an optical imaging technique based on the principle of low-coherence interferometry and can be used to image various ocular structures non-invasively. Ocular structures such as blood vessels and collagen with high optical absorption and/or scattering significantly attenuate OCT light propagation and thus, cast shadows below these highly attenuating locations in OCT a-scans. An improved attenuation compensation procedure is presented to minimize shadows and resolve tissue structure by solving an integral equation with exponential non-linearity that govern OCT light transport in a tissue. Frangi filter was used to extract retinal blood vessel network from 2D photographs and 3D OCT scans of the retina. The location and orientation of retinal blood vessels were identified using eigen analysis of the Hessian matrix at each retinal location. Vessels of varying diameters were identified by conducting eigen analysis at multiple scales using scale-space theory. Further, a 3-D geometrical model of the vessel network was extracted from the scale-space analysis. Our methodology was evaluated using 2D photographs of human subjects and 3D OCT volume scans of the retina of porcine eyes. Results demonstrate that the proposed attenuation compensation procedure and retinal vessel extraction from OCT scans using Frangi filter is feasible. Matlab, Python, VolView and VTK software libraries were used for software analysis and visualization.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

Download

Share

COinS