2011 Winter Project Week:SegEye

Segmentation of the eye ball.

Axial view of the eye ball segmentation.

Key Investigators

• Georgia Tech: Ivan Kolesov and Allen Tannenbaum
• MGH: Gregory Sharp

Objective

• We are interested in segmenting the eye ball, lens, optic nerve, and the optic chiasm.
• Anatomical structures are highly sensitive to radiation.
• We are creating a framework to perform these segmentations, which is likely to require a different approach for each structures due to the proximity of multiple structures to each other.

Approach

• The eye ball is considered to be the pivotal organ since its segmentation will localize the region of interest when looking for other structures.
• We will reduce the dimensionality of this problem by performing model based segmentation for each structure.
• Once the eye is segmented, we use this knowledge to locate the lens/ initialize optic nerve segmentation.
• We would like to leverage the information provided by a CT scan with additional data from an MRI -- we have to consider this registration problem.

Progress

• We segmented the eye ball.
• Experiments:

#-VMTK Modules in Slicer for optic nerve segmentation.
#-The particle filtering based approach for nerve segmentation.
#-Ellipse constrained segmentation of optic lens.

• Received a number of suggestions for future experiments:

#-Incorporate constraints on Hounsfield units for segmentation of CT imagery.
#-Use atlas for more robust localization of eye ball.
#-Add prior anatomical knowledge for optic nerve segmentation (surrounding bone easily visible).