Depth-resolved vascular profile features for artery-vein classification in OCT and OCT angiography of human retina

TL;DR

This paper investigates depth-resolved reflectance features of retinal vessels in OCT to improve artery-vein classification in OCT angiography, revealing distinct boundary and lumen reflectivity patterns for arteries and veins.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method using depth-resolved OCT features for accurate artery-vein differentiation in retinal imaging.

Findings

Retinal arteries show hyper-reflective boundaries at both walls.

Retinal veins have hyper-reflectivity only at the upper boundary.

Lumen reflectivity varies with vessel size and type.

Abstract

This study is to characterize reflectance profiles of retinal blood vessels in optical coherence tomography (OCT), and to validate these vascular features to guide artery-vein classification in OCT angiography (OCTA) of human retina. Depth-resolved OCT reveals unique features of retinal arteries and veins. Retinal arteries show hyper-reflective boundaries at both upper (inner side towards the vitreous) and lower (outer side towards the choroid) walls. In contrary, retinal veins reveal hyper-reflectivity at the upper boundary only. Uniform lumen intensity was observed in both small and large arteries. However, the vein lumen intensity was dependent on the vessel size. Small veins exhibit a hyper-reflective zone at the bottom half of the lumen, while large veins show a hypo-reflective zone at the bottom half of the lumen