Retinal OCT Texture Analysis for Differentiating Healthy Controls from Multiple Sclerosis (MS) with/without Optic Neuritis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory disease damaging the myelin sheath in the central and peripheral nervous system in the brain and spinal cord. Optic Neuritis (ON) is one of the most prevalent ocular demonstrations of MS. The current diagnosis protocol for MS is MRI, but newer modalities like Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) are already of interest in early detection and progression analysis. OCT reveals the symptoms of MS in the Central Nervous System (CNS) through cross-sectional images from neural retinal layers. Previous works on OCT were mostly focused on the thickness of retinal layers; however, texture features seem also to have information in this regard. In this research, we introduce a new pipeline that constructs layer-stacked (LS) images containing data from each specific layer. A variety of texture features are then extracted from LS images to differentiate between healthy controls and ON/None-ON MS cases. Furthermore, the definition of texture extraction methods is tailored for this application. After performing a vast survey on available texture analysis methods, a treasury of powerful features is collected in this paper. As a primary work, this paper shows the ability of such features in the diagnosis of HC and MS (ON and None-ON) cases. Our findings show that the texture features are powerful to diagnose MS cases. Furthermore, adding information of conventional thickness values to texture features improves considerably the discrimination between most of the target groups including HC vs. MS, HC vs. MS-None-ON, and HC vs. MS-ON.