Alignment of 3-D optical coherence tomography scans to correct eye movement using a particle filtering

Eye movement artifacts occurring during 3-D optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanning is a well-recognized problem that may adversely affect image analysis and interpretation. A particle filtering algorithm is presented in this paper to correct motion in a 3-D dataset by considering eye movement as a target tracking problem in a dynamic system. The proposed particle filtering algorithm is an independent 3-D alignment approach, which does not rely on any reference image. 3-D OCT data is considered as a dynamic system, while the location of each A-scan is represented by the state space. A particle set is used to approximate the probability density of the state in the dynamic system. The state of the system is updated frame by frame to detect A-scan movement. The proposed method was applied on both simulated data for objective evaluation and experimental data for subjective evaluation. The sensitivity and specificity of the x-movement detection were 98.85% and 99.43%, respectively, in the simulated data. For the experimental data (74 3-D OCT images), all the images were improved after z-alignment, while 81.1% images were improved after x-alignment. The proposed algorithm is an efficient way to align 3-D OCT volume data and correct the eye movement without using references.