Automated segmentation of geographic atrophy in fundus autofluorescence images using supervised pixel classification

Geographic atrophy (GA) is a manifestation of the advanced or late stage of age-related macular degeneration (AMD). AMD is the leading cause of blindness in people over the age of 65 in the western world. The purpose of this study is to develop a fully automated supervised pixel classification approach for segmenting GA, including uni- and multifocal patches in fundus autofluorescene (FAF) images. The image features include region-wise intensity measures, gray-level co-occurrence matrix measures, and Gaussian filter banks. A [Formula: see text]-nearest-neighbor pixel classifier is applied to obtain a GA probability map, representing the likelihood that the image pixel belongs to GA. Sixteen randomly chosen FAF images were obtained from 16 subjects with GA. The algorithm-defined GA regions are compared with manual delineation performed by a certified image reading center grader. Eight-fold cross-validation is applied to evaluate the algorithm performance. The mean overlap ratio (OR), area correlation (Pearson's [Formula: see text]), accuracy (ACC), true positive rate (TPR), specificity (SPC), positive predictive value (PPV), and false discovery rate (FDR) between the algorithm- and manually defined GA regions are [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text], respectively.