Parallel graph search: application to intraretinal layer segmentation of 3-D macular OCT scans

Image segmentation is of paramount importance for quantitative analysis of medical image data. Recently, a 3-D graph search method which can detect globally optimal interacting surfaces with respect to the cost function of volumetric images has been introduced, and its utility demonstrated in several application areas. Although the method provides excellent segmentation accuracy, its limitation is a slow processing speed when many surfaces are simultaneously segmented in large volumetric datasets. Here, we propose a novel method of parallel graph search, which overcomes the limitation and allows the quick detection of multiple surfaces. To demonstrate the obtained performance with respect to segmentation accuracy and processing speedup, the new approach was applied to retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) image data and compared with the performance of the former non-parallel method. Our parallel graph search methods for single and double surface detection are approximately 267 and 181 times faster than the original graph search approach in 5 macular OCT volumes (200 x 5 x 1024 voxels) acquired from the right eyes of 5 normal subjects. The resulting segmentation differences were small as demonstrated by the mean unsigned differences between the non-parallel and parallel methods of 0.0 ± 0.0 voxels (0.0 ± 0.0 μm) and 0.27 ± 0.34 voxels (0.53 ± 0.66 μm) for the single- and dual-surface approaches, respectively.