Motion artefact correction in retinal optical coherence tomography using local symmetry

Area of Science:

• Ophthalmology
• Medical Imaging
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• Motion artifacts in spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) scans significantly degrade volumetric data quality.
• These artifacts impede crucial processes like image registration and three-dimensional analysis.
• Artifacts can be misidentified as actual retinal pathologies, leading to diagnostic errors.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a novel method for correcting motion artifacts in SD-OCT scans.
• To ensure the proposed method preserves the overall retinal shape during artifact correction.
• To compare the accuracy of the proposed method against a hardware eye tracker.

Main Methods:

• A new artifact correction technique was developed for SD-OCT data.
• The method utilizes a single volume scan for motion artifact correction.
• Quantitative validation employed synthetic SD-OCT volumes; qualitative validation involved expert grading of 100 SD-OCT scans.

Main Results:

• The proposed method effectively corrects motion artifacts while maintaining retinal structure integrity.
• Validation with synthetic data confirmed the method's quantitative accuracy.
• Expert evaluation on 100 scans demonstrated qualitative improvements in image quality.

Conclusions:

• The developed method offers a robust solution for mitigating motion artifacts in SD-OCT imaging.
• This technique enhances the reliability of SD-OCT for diagnostic and research purposes.
• The findings support the clinical utility of this motion artifact correction approach.