Retinal image analysis software for neurodegenerative disease research

Our goal is to develop and validate a device independent software application for analysis of optical coherence tomography OCT images of the human retina Our system will make quantitative measurements of retinal layer thicknesses at the macula in support of the generation of biomarkers for measuring onset and progression of ocular and neurodegenerative diseases including age related macular degeneration AMD diabetic retinopathy DR glaucoma multiple sclerosis MS Alzheimer s disease Parkinson s disease and amytrophic lateral sclerosis ALS Retinal layer thicknesses indicate atrophy through thinning and increased fluid or inflammation through thickening Accurate device independent segmentation of retinal layers together with longitudinal analysis of the layer thicknesses can return a number of quantitative biomarkers to correlate with disease onset and progression and facilitate direct comparison across OCT devices to results from normal to estimate the degree of abnormalities Specifically we are aiming to Aim Improve our segmentation of diseased eyes Orion www voxeleron com orion our current research platform has been validated and used extensively on normal non pathologic eyes Our structural analyses of retinal layers may be complicated however by ocular diseases or opacities prevalent in an aging population Current software ours included can perform poorly in the case of disease a situation we aim to ameliorate by improving our current segmentation algorithm in these cases and validating its performance on a large hand segmented dataset including AMD DR and glaucoma cases taken from at least different device manufacturers OCT cameras Aim Add longitudinal analysis to our segmentation software Clinically static analysis of data has limited utility We will add longitudinal analysis to our existing segmentation capabilities to measure the change of thicknesses over time This new clinical workstation will be rigorously tested by determining agreement with expert generated ground truth NARRATIVE This project will establish an image analysis software platform to automatically process optical coherence tomography images of the human retina This platform will provide the first device independent and commercially available software that can perform analyses static or longitudinal on the thicknesses of the layers of the retina directly associated with photo receptor and neuronal degeneration As such it will accelerate the pace of discovery and understanding in both ocular and neurodegenerative diseases and facilitate the development of clinical biomarkers for diseases such as age related macular degeneration diabetic retinopathy glaucoma Alzheimer s Parkinson s multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that affect millions of Americans