Work

Constructing a statistical atlas of the radii of the optic nerve and cerebrospinal fluid sheath in young healthy adults

Year: 2015

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Optic neuritis is a sudden inflammation of the optic nerve (ON) and is marked by pain on eye movement, and visual symptoms such as a decrease in visual acuity, color vision, contrast and visual field defects. The ON is closely linked with multiple sclerosis (MS) and patients have a 50% chance of developing MS within 15 years. Recent advances in multi-atlas segmentation methods have omitted volumetric assessment. In the past, measuring the size of the ON has been done by hand. We utilize a new method of automatically segmenting the ON to measure the radii of both the ON and surrounding cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) sheath to develop a normative distribution of healthy young adults. We examine this distribution for any trends and find that ON and CSF sheath radii do not vary between 20-35 years of age and between sexes. We evaluate how six patients suffering from optic neuropathy compare to this distribution of controls. We find that of these six patients, five of them qualitatively differ from the normative distribution which suggests this technique could be used in the future to distinguish between optic neuritis patients and healthy controls.

Source: Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

DOI: 10.1117/12.2081887

Authors: Robert L. Harrigan, Andrew J. Plassard, Louise A. Mawn, Robert L. Galloway, Seth A. Smith, Bennett A. Landman

Institution: Vanderbilt University

Language: English

Topic: Medical Image Segmentation Techniques

Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green