Automatic Three-dimensional Detection of Photoreceptor Ellipsoid Zone Disruption Caused by Trauma in the OCT

Detection and assessment of the integrity of the photoreceptor ellipsoid zone (EZ) are important because it is critical for visual acuity in retina trauma and other diseases. We have proposed and validated a framework that can automatically analyse the 3D integrity of the EZ in optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. The images are first filtered and automatically segmented into 10 layers, of which EZ is located in the 7th layer. For each voxel of the EZ, 57 features are extracted and a principle component analysis is performed to optimize the features. An Adaboost classifier is trained to classify each voxel of the EZ as disrupted or non-disrupted. Finally, blood vessel silhouettes and isolated points are excluded. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the proposed framework was tested on 15 eyes with retinal trauma and 15 normal eyes. For the eyes with retinal trauma, the sensitivity (SEN) was 85.69% ± 9.59%, the specificity (SPE) was 85.91% ± 5.48%, and the balanced accuracy rate (BAR) was 85.80% ± 6.16%. For the normal eyes, the SPE was 99.03% ± 0.73%, and the SEN and BAR levels were not relevant. Our framework has the potential to become a useful tool for studying retina trauma and other conditions involving EZ integrity.