Quantitative assessment of age-related macular degeneration using parametric modeling of the leakage transfer function: Preliminary results

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a major cause of blindness and visual impairment in older adults. The wet form of the disease is characterized by abnormal blood vessels forming a choroidal neovascular membrane (CNV), that result in destruction of normal architecture of the retina. Current evaluation and follow up of wet AMD include subjective evaluation of Fluorescein Angiograms (FA) to determine the activity of the lesion and monitor the progression or regression of the disease. However, this subjective evaluation prevents accurate monitoring of the disease progression or regression in response to a pharmacologic agent. In this work, we present a method that allows objective assessment of the activity of a CNV lesion which can be statistically compared across different patient and time points. The method is based on a hypothesis that the discrepancy in the time-intensity signals among the diseased and normal retinal areas are due to an implicit transfer function whose parameters can be used to characterize the retina. The method begins with parametric modeling of the temporal variation of the lesion and background intensities. Then, the values of the model parameters are used to evaluate the change in the activity of the disease. Preliminary results on five datasets show that the calculated parameters are highly correlated with the Visual Acuity (VA) of the patients.