Optical coherence tomography: Health information embedded on OCT signal statistics

Optical coherence tomography is becoming one of the most important imaging modalities in the area of ophthalmology because of being noninvasive and by allowing to visualize the human retina structure in detail. It was recently proposed that OCT data embeds functional information from the human retina. Specifically, it was proposed that blood-retinal barrier status information is present within OCT data. Following this rationale, in this work we illustrate (based on support vector machines) the possibility to discriminate between eyes from healthy volunteers, eyes from type 2 diabetic patients with no signs of diabetic retinopathy (ETDRS level 10 eyes) and eyes diagnosed with diabetic macular edema, thus confirming the presence within OCT data of information on the BRB status.