Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a degenerative ocular disease that develops by the formation of drusen in the macula region leading to blindness. This condition can be detected automatically by automated image processing techniques applied in spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) volumes. The most common approach is the individualized analysis of each slice (B-Scan) of the SD-OCT volumes. However, it ends up losing the correlation between pixels of neighboring slices. The retina representation by topographic maps reveals the similarity of these structures with geographic relief maps, which can be represented by geostatistical descriptors. In this paper, we present a methodology based on geostatistical functions for the automatic diagnosis of AMD in SD-OCT.
The proposed methodology is based on the construction of a topographic map of the macular region. Over the topographic map, we compute geostatistical features using semivariogram and semimadogram functions as texture descriptors. The extracted descriptors are then used as input for a Support Vector Machine classifier.
For training of the classifier and tests, a database composed of 384 OCT exams (269 volumes of eyes exhibiting AMD and 115 control volumes) with layers segmented and validated by specialists were used. The best classification model, validated with cross-validation k-fold, achieved an accuracy of 95.2% and an AUROC of 0.989.