Automated combination of optical coherence tomography images and fundus images

Abstract

We discuss approaches to combining multimodal multidimensional images, namely, three-dimensional optical coherence tomography (OCT) data and two-dimensional color images of the fundus. Registration of these two modalities can help to adjust the position of the obtained OCT images on the retina. Some existing approaches to matching fundus images are based on finding key points that are considered invariant to affine transformations and are common to the two images. However, errors in the identification of such points can lead to registration errors. There are also methods for iterative adjustment of conversion parameters, but they are based on some manual settings. In this paper, we propose a method based on a full or partial search of possible combinations of the OCT image transformation to find the best approximation of the true transformation. The best approximation is determined using a measure of comparison of preprocessed image pixels. Further, the obtained transformations are compared with the available true transformations to assess the quality of the algorithm. The structure of the work includes: pre-processing of OCT and fundus images with the extraction of blood vessels, random search or grid search over possible transformation parameters (shift, rotation and scaling), and evaluation of the quality of the algorithm.