A new three-dimensional segmentation approach of retina Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) volume data is presented

which makes full use of the retina layers’ directions

signal intensity peaks and divide-and-conquer strategy to detect multiple retina boundary surfaces. The primary position of the inner limiting membrane (ILM) is determined by finding the first peak in every A-scan from top to bottom in the volume. Abnormal points of the boundary are removed by using surface smoothness constraints. The retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) boundary surface is obtained similarly by finding the first peak in every A-scan from bottom to top. Then

the boundary surface of the inner segments and outer segments (IS/OS) layer is positioned by detecting the maximum intensity of every A-scan in the sub-volume data between the ILM and RPE. Finally

the boundary surface of the inner nuclear layer and the outer plexiform (INL/OPL) layer is segmented by searching the first peak of every A-scan from bottom to top in the sub-volume data between the ILM and IS/OS. Experimental results show that the method can not only segment the four boundary surfaces correctly

but also only takes several seconds for segmenting each surface on a personal computer.